Failsafe

"A safety link that every robot has, so it can be immobilised, in the pits, for security reasons. Pull that out, and the machine will stop."

- Jonathan Pearce

A Fail Safe (often called a Safety Link or simply Link) is a small removable link that had to be equipped to all robots competing in Robot Wars. If this link was removed, then the robot would automatically become immobilised. They had to be installed into every robot as a safety precaution, incase a robot, for instance, went berserk in the pits.

Robots would often have these Fail Safes either come loose or fall out completely mid-way through a battle, if they were hit rather abruptly in the area where the Fail Safe was housed, this was very often the main reason for a robot suddenly becoming immobilised, this occured many times over the course of the show's run.

These Fail Safes were only really enforced as a necessity for every competing roboteer in the later series, due to several accidents relating to this in the pits. It was down to roboteer Rex Garrod who claimed that making all robots come fixed with Fail Safe devices would largely reduce the risk for any more accidents.