End-of-day report. Post 14, Blanchimont (at Spa). No racing at our end this Sunday. I read the Singapore report on Monday, at the kitchen table in Stavelot, with the usual thermos.
Observation. During the race, the radio on the leading Red Bull worked in one direction only. The driver could hear his engineer, Gianpiero Lambiase. In the other direction, the driver’s voice arrived distorted, metallic. The engineer eventually found other ways to communicate. The car won. First victory at Singapore, second in a row.
At the post, we know it. A radio that receives and no longer transmits happens around eleven o’clock, when the battery weakens. We hear race control. It doesn’t hear us. We raise the flag anyway. I wave the flag. I don’t judge.
The team principal, Laurent Mekies, opened his media session with a joke. “No, we did it on purpose,” he said, according to RacingNews365. Then: “It wasn’t the same problem as on Friday. It was a fairly difficult situation, because these cars are complicated and an enormous amount of communication is needed between the drivers and the engineers.”
Post note. A radio that works in one direction is “copy” in its purest form. We heard. We cannot answer. Thirty years I have been saying it.
He praised his engineer, who found ways to communicate when it was really crucial. He added that the problem did not come from the conditions. “It was down to us,” he said. A team principal who writes the cause in his own report without waiting for the heated room. I copied it into the folder.
Your correspondent observes that the pit wall, for its part, has always had the floor. It is the marshals’ post that never has.
Jean-Luc, my reserve, asked whether he could do it on purpose too, next time. Refused. Nothing further to report.
It’s true, we checked: RacingNews365.
