By Joe Murphy
Red Bull appear to be on the back foot after F1 testing as answers about their true pace remain up in the air.
The team who finished third last season has admitted that F1 testing was “not as smooth” as they expected with debate over their race pace compared to Constructors Champions McLaren ahead of the Australian Grand Prix in less than a few weeks time.
Across last week’s testing in Bahrain, Red Bull completed the least number of laps. However, Max Verstappen set the second-best time of the last day on Friday behind George Russell.
The RB21 went through multiple changes and even suffered a water pressure failure on Thursday. This meant that neither Verstappen or Lawson completed a full race simulation.
Pierre Wache, technical director for the team, had this to say: “It was not as smooth a test as we expected and the team expected, but it is better to find some problems here than later down the line and it is why we are here, to understand the car. The weather was not with us and not very representative of this track, but we tried to explore the potential of the car and tried to understand how it responds to different set-ups, and I think we more or less achieved that. I am not as happy as I could be because the car did not respond how we wanted at times, but it is going in the right direction, just maybe the magnitude of the direction was not as big as we expected and it’s something we need to work on for the first race and future development.”
Verstappen himself said that there is plenty of;” Work to do” but also that testing ‘wasn’t bad’.
Verstappen has the opportunity to equal Michael Schumacher’s record of five consecutive titles this year but Lando Norris goes into the season as favourite after seemingly having more pace at his disposal: “I think it wasn’t bad but at the same time there is still a bit of work to do. However, it is what we expected and we will keep on working and keep on trying to improve and hopefully, as we go into Melbourne, we will learn a bit more by going through all the data and see where we are at. It is difficult to tell where everyone’s pace is, so there is still a bit of work to do for us. We are looking forward to starting racing properly again in Australia.”
Other drivers including the likes of Lewis Hamilton, actually gave Red Bull credit for being more competitive than they are being made out to be. Testing gives useful information, but until qualifying begins mid-March in Melbourne, it isn’t clear to see exactly what these teams and drivers have up their sleeve.
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