F1 Today | Horner shocked by race director, Mercedes suppliers go bankrupt
F1 News
Another day has come to an end, and GPblog, as always, has more news from the F1 world to share! Christian Horner admits that he was frustrated with the Brazilian Grand Prix race director Niels Wittich after an 'unsafe' call, a key Mercedes supplier files for bankruptcy and Guenther Steiner tells a GPblog a story about former Haas driver Nikita Mazepin.
Horner was left frustrated by the race director:
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner believes that he was surprised the Grand Prix was not stopped earlier because of the weather. During the race, there were incidents, and as the weather situation got worse, the safety car was called out. At one point, in terms of rain, it got to a point where it was no longer possible to race, so the safety car came out. Yet that still proved not enough, as Franco Colapinto lost control of his car and crashed hard. It was then that race control decided to wave the red flag.
"There were a couple of surprises for me in that race. One was that it wasn't red-flagged sooner. There were a lot of drivers that were feeling that the conditions were too unsafe. The restarts as well, after effectively an out and an in lap from the safety car when the back of the tail hadn't caught up, it just seemed over-ambitious to get the race going again," the Red Bull team boss admitted, even though his driver Max Verstappen won the race comfortably.
Bad news for Mercedes - Suppliers go bankrupt:
Mercedes turbocharger supplier, Reaction Engines, has gone bankrupt. Arrangements have been made by the German team, therefore, to receive the necessary hardware for the 2025 season. Moreover, the team have already decided to stop using that turbocharger entering the 2026 season. Reaction Engines has previously had financial problems. Those were previously solved by external investors, but in October, they could not find another investor. 170 workers (out of 208) in Oxfordshire were already told they would be let go before the start of November. The company tried to gather more money to continue, but a last-ditch effort to secure investment failed and as a result, the company was declared bankrupt.
Steiner's admission on Mazepin:
See this extract from GPblog's interview with Guenther Steiner. The Haas boss told the story of how Mazepin's father even brought his son a new chassis in the hope it would improve his performance: Dmitri Mazepin, Nikita's father, had enough of how his son's turbulent 2021 season was going. Mick Schumacher, Mazepin's teammate, was consistently faster than his son, and he believed something was wrong. There is no other explanation. His suspicion? Something was wrong with the chassis. But the Haas team had already completely dismantled the car several times and no technical fault could be found anywhere. Still, Mazepin's father insisted.
Guenther Steiner, in an exclusive interview with GPblog, said that he was not going to have a prolonged debate about it. "I said to him, ‘I'm not going to pay for a new chassis because there's nothing wrong with the chassis’. He said, ‘I want a new chassis’. Okay. He said, 'I have no problem to pay'. Okay, then we buy one. It's easy. It's like, I'm not fighting if he wants to buy one. I mean, he can buy five chassis. I'm fine with that, as long as he pays them." Read the full article by clicking THIS link!
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