VIDEO: Red Bull blasts through an F1 pit stop in total darkness

Red Bull Racing has notched up another world record: this time for completing a pit stop in under 3.0 seconds – in complete darkness.

Okay, it’s a weird record, but it’s easy enough to imagine how the idea came about. Pit stops are a crucial part of Formula 1, and shaving tenths off a car’s stationary time can mean the difference between winning and losing, which is why F1 teams practice them over and over again.

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Teams practice pit stops so much, in fact, that you can just imagine an observer muttering “Geez, I bet you could do it with your eyes closed…”

Cue that being overheard by a clever marketing exec and hey presto, you have the ‘Pitch Black Pit Stop’.

Red Bull gave itself 10 attempts to see how fast it could complete the blind stop which was captured using special infrared lights and infrared cameras.

The two jackmen and the driver of the car wore night vision goggles but everyone else was operating in total darkness.

Red Bull’s first pit stop took 7.52 seconds but by attempt eight they had cut it down to 3.2sec, showing just how impressive and adaptable the crew is.

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On the tenth attempt, Red Bull completed the dark stop in 2.84 seconds – which, remarkably, is only a second away from the team’s fastest-ever pit stop in an actual race.

Before the challenge, Red Bull asked key team members to predict how quickly the team could do the dark stop. Jonathan Wheatley, team sporting director, guessed 2.1sec while team boss Christian Horner was closer to the mark at 2.6sec.

Red Bull’s drivers were way off. Max Verstappen thought it’d take 6.69 seconds, but Sergio Perez wasn’t even in the same ballpark with a guess of 33 seconds. Such faith...

Amazingly, this blind pit stop isn’t the craziest stunt Red Bull has put its crew through.

Back in 2019, Red Bull attempted a ‘zero gravity’ pitstop where it bundled 16 crew members and an F1 car into a Ilyushin Il-76 MDK plane which flew at 33,000 feet. The plane then dived in a special arc to allow 22 seconds of near weightlessness for the crew to do their pitstop.

As for what’s next? We’re almost afraid to ask…

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