Formula 1 team Red Bull has a second or third peloton machine and has not yet fought for titles, but has erected the skill of stopping in boxes to completely cosmic heights.
The Austrian team of mechanics broke the pit stop speed record three times, pushing the boundaries of the possible immediately by 0.1 seconds in 2019.
There is simply no better team in modern races and never has been – even Ferrari and Mercedes are 0.4-0.5 seconds behind in one pit stop.
The team bosses decided to complicate the task for their guys: they set a goal for them to make a stop in zero gravity in just 20 seconds.
And you know what? The mechanics of Max Verstappen and Alexander Albon has coped – and at the same time showed extreme acrobatic skills. Moreover, even fewer people participated in the tire change than on the racetrack: there are ten of them in the video, and 16 are only actively participating in the track.
Seriously, this is a must see – the entertainment of this pit stop would be envied by Zack Snyder, Michael Bay and all the directors of The Fast and the Furious combined.
But that’s not all: the video was filmed in the Moscow Region in Star City – at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center. You may have watched, but the main role in the achievement was played by the Roskosmos Il-76MDK aircraft – a specially equipped board for training in conditions of recreated weightlessness.
It is achieved by piloting on the Kepler’s parabola: the car first rises to a height of 6.5 km, then abruptly adds another 3000 meters in 20 seconds, flies 9.5 km for about half a minute, and then drops sharply to the previous 6.5 km. In total, the time of weightlessness after overloads in the 2G area is about 25-28 seconds – that is why the Red Bull team had to do everything in a short period of time.
To carry out such tricks in an airplane, the hull and wings are reinforced, the batteries are reworked along with hydraulic and irrigation systems and the entire interior is finished with soft materials. There are three such aircraft in total.
