While there was nothing in the way of racing in Melbourne on a soggy Sunday morning there was at least some fiery on-track action.
The Castrol Mustang rolled to a stop on its way to the grid, before Randle made a swift exit from the cockpit.
That was because he had spotted both smoke and flames, invoking memories of the Ford engine fires at Albert Park back in 2023.
In this case, however, it was actually the heated windscreen that had caught fire.
“I was on my way to the grid and at the second-last corner I saw smoke going across the dashboard from the left side to the right,” Randle told Fox Sports.
“I thought, ‘that’s a bit odd’, and I thought maybe it was some oil on the exhaust wrapping or something.
“I was trying not to think too much about it. And then I saw a flame coming out of the bottom left hand side of the windscreen.
“I called ‘fire’ and I thought back to the few times that Fords have been on fire in the past, and it’s always been from the left front.
“So I pulled up to the back of the grid, jumped out, and then the flame went out. I thought, ‘that’s odd, I swear this thing was on fire’.
“We started up again and it caught fire again. It looks like it’s the heated screen connector that’s sparked on something.”
Randle admitted that he was “guessing” as to what the cause could be, but did point out that the Mustangs have only recently been fitted with proper moulded composite dashboards.
“We haven’t had to use the heated screen yet with these dashboards, so I don’t know, I guess the power distribution module is meant to pick up on the spike and kill it, which it clearly hasn’t,” he said.
“They’ll have to dig into the data and see why it allowed there to be current for that long to lead to one fire, and then to catch fire again.
“Thankfully it put itself out and we went around a few times in very wet conditions.”
Race 4 of the Melbourne SuperSprint was abandoned due to wet weather at Albert Park.
