Experimenting at the command line shows that the record object keeps a reference to the array:

```
>>> a
array((4.5, 16843009), 
      dtype=[('a', '<f8'), ('b', '<i4')])
>>> 0
0
>>> sys.getrefcount(a)
2
>>> rec = a[()]
>>> sys.getrefcount(a)
3
>>> del rec
>>> sys.getrefcount(a)
2
```