Industry News
KERS failure causes F1 team evacuation
18th July 2008
A report on the autosport.com website says that the evacuation of the Milton Keynes, UK headquarters of the Red Bull Racing Formula One team on Wednesday was the result of the failure of a Kinetic Energy Recovery System which was being tested.
RBR team principal Christian Horner told autosport.com that a battery failure occurred in the team's new KERS and that the local fire brigade was called out.
Horner said, "For next year, we are introducing batteries to the cars, which are very high voltage, high technology pieces of equipment. Basically, in a controlled environment we had a battery that basically ran away with itself.
"It was contained within a chemical, as a safety precaution to keep it cool, that let off quite a lot of steam and unfortunately caused about two hours of disruption in the main factory as the smoke had to be dealt with by the fire brigade.
"It was not a major incident and never at any point dangerous, but one that we obviously had to take all precautions with."
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