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Formula Bun: Sandwich packet behind Sirotkin's Melbourne retirement

A sandwich packet has been identified as the suspected cause of Sergey Sirotkin's Australian Grand Prix retirement.

By Jack Davies
Sergey Sirotkins Formula One debut was thwarted by a sandwich packet

Melbourne, March 25: Sergey Sirotkin's Formula One debut was thwarted by a sandwich packet in Melbourne on Sunday, according to the Russian Williams driver.

Sirotkin was forced to retire four laps into the Australian Grand Prix with a brake problem.

And it has since transpired that an item of discarded lunch packaging was likely behind the 22-year-old's problems.

"You will not believe what happened," said Sirotkin. "There was a plastic sandwich bag that went into the rear-right brake duct.

"That caused massive overheating, which caused massive temperature spikes and it destroyed all the brakes.

"I lost the pedal completely. It was lucky there was no wall there so the car is still in one piece."

Williams' chief technical officer, Paddy Lowe, added: "We need to do some forensics on that, but we have residue of what looks like a melted plastic bag.

"Lance [Stroll] actually said he saw some plastic bags at Turn 1 very early in the race. We measure disc temperatures and that's where we see them suddenly start to go through the roof, at exactly that part of the circuit, so that also corroborates.

"We'll go through and analyse it, but the pieces do seem to add up well to it being a complete blockage of the brake duct on the right rear with all the temperatures going through the roof, eventually catching fire, and then the actual catastrophic [failure].

"We lost all the sensors from that corner, progressively as they got burned and eventually the seal has probably gone on the calliper because there's a fluid leak and the pedal went to the floor."

Story first published: Monday, March 26, 2018, 16:51 [IST]
Other articles published on Mar 26, 2018