Red Bull team principal Jonathan Wheatley said the team repaired his car in just 1. 45 seconds on the front axle, and that the challenge was to turn that into a full pit stop.
Red Bull saw its record pit prevention time of 1. 82 seconds, set at the 2019 Brazilian Grand Prix, fall into F1 2023, as McLaren set the new standard.
McLaren’s 1. 8-second pit stop at the Qatar Grand Prix set a new record for the fastest pit stop ever seen in F1 as Red Bull prepares to regain its crown.
Of course, many other people want to come together in the best synergy to achieve the best pit stop, from bullseye drivers to mechanics on wheels to jack operators.
And if the Red Bull team can meet the tyre replacement times set by the front axle mechanics, then Red Bull has a chance to break that record.
“We can get 1. 6 [seconds] on the corner times,” Red Bull lead engineer Rich Wolverson said on the Talking Bull podcast.
“It’s just getting everything together.”
Red Bull team principal Jonathan Wheatley lowered that bar even further.
“On the axis, you get 1. 45, 1. 48,” he said.
“I look at a pit stop and I see something beautiful when everything is going as it should. And it’s this human contribution to motorsport that I find extraordinary. “
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Of course, a pit stop does not go as planned and, in exceptional cases, can put other people in the paddock at risk.
Red Bull had a lot of fun at the 2013 German Grand Prix, where a wheel on Mark Webber’s car hit cameraman Paul Allen, leaving him with broken bones.
Wheatley detailed how Red Bull put that emotional trauma into attempting to ensure such an incident would not happen again, leading to the creation of the modern F1 wheel gun system.
“We had an incident where a wheel in the pit lane, Mark Webber’s car, hit a cameraman,” Wheatley recalled.
“And when you can sit here on days like this and look at the trophies and walk away, in the pit top aspect, there’s a problem like that. If you have any kind of empathy, you’ve hurt someone, as much as possible. “As far as you’re concerned, you’ve hurt someone.
“And we did a complete overhaul of our pits as sensible as possible to make it as sensible as possible. And that was a very sensible precedent and an overall commitment from Christian [Horner, team principal] and the technical team here at the factory. And a very, very brilliant organization of people came up with this clever wheeled gun formula that we have now.
“It can’t solve every disorder, but all the disorders we’ve heard about and anything we think might happen in a well to avoid it in the future, we try to find some kind of solution as well as replace them. “Some other basic parts of the factors involved in the pit prevent.
“I think we’ve reached a point where I don’t have to hold my breath to avoid the pits every weekend.
While Red Bull’s pit-stop record fell to McLaren in F1 2023, they did top the DHL standings for the sixth season in a row.
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