Red Bull suspect tram put Webber out
Red Bull Racing suspect that Mark Webber's retirement from the Singapore Grand Prix may have been caused by static electricity produced by a nearby tram
Webber was forced out of the Singapore night race with his first mechanical failure of the season, just as it seemed he was on course to take a podium finish thanks to a brilliant pit call by his team under the first safety car.
But Webber pulled into the pits on lap 30 with a broken gearbox when it tried to select two gears at once. And without an obvious explanation for the problem, team principal Christian Horner suspects that total freak circumstances were to blame.
"At Turn 13 the gearbox selected two gears at once," Horner told . "The moog valve controlling the gearshift had been triggered into changing to seventh while he was still in fifth.
"Yet after interrogating the software we can see that it at no time was allowing for this. We can see a momentary electrical surge at the precise moment, which seems to have triggered the moog valve.
"It was exactly what [Toro Rosso] suffered from with (Sebastien) Bourdais in Friday practice, at exactly the same place. A tram line runs beneath the track at that corner and it seems as if static from a passing tram at the very moment Mark was in the corner passed through the ground."
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