15/04/2017
NEWS STORY
FP2 saw the T-wing fall from Valtteri Bottas' Mercedes for the second weekend running, the errant aerodynamic device having gone 'fly-about' in Shanghai also.
At first little more was thought about the incident other than that perhaps the ugly devices should be banned on safety grounds in anticipation of the day when one was to fall into the path of another car, possibly hitting a driver, one of the reasons the Halo is to be introduced next year.
It was subsequently learned however that Max Verstappen had run over the wing, causing damage to his car and severely limiting his track time as, among other things, a new floor had to be fitted.
Ironically, Red Bull does not run a T-wing, but this, according to Horner, has no influence on his opinion that they should be banned.
"Today it did about £50,000 worth of damage so I think they should be banned on the grounds of safety and cost!" he said. "And that's not just because we don't have one."
"It's unfortunate," he continued. "It's one of those things. A bit of debris on the circuit today that had fallen off, I think, Bottas' car. Max was the unlucky victim that was the first car at speed to come across it. It did quite a lot of damage to the underside of the car. One of those things, unfortunately."
"It was unfortunate and to be honest I’m surprised how much damage it actually did to the floor," admitted Verstappen. "The team did a great job to change it so quickly and check the car over before I went back out on track."
Asked if there was a particular reason why Bottas had suffered two successive failures, Mercedes Technical Director, James Allison, admitted: "It's a surprise because we've done a huge number of kilometres without problems and then we've had two annoying hassles so I suspect it will be a small manufacturing defect and it's something we will need to reinforce to make sure it doesn't happen again, come Saturday and Sunday."
Check out our Saturday gallery from Bahrain, here.