Red Bull has highlighted the next steps required to transform its troublesome RB21 machine into an F1 championship contender.
Four-time F1 champion Max Verstappen made an outstanding performance during the Japanese Grand Prix weekend, capturing his 64th F1 victory from an unexpected pole position.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner admitted after that qualifying run that the mechanics had “turned the car upside down” to find performance after Friday practice, when Verstappen appeared to be well off the pace.
There are still flaws with the car, but the team has been working to resolve them since the middle of last year, when an alarming dip in form threatened Verstappen’s title defence. He eventually won the championship despite only winning two of the final 14 races, having won seven of the first ten.
Adrian Newey, the team’s chief technical officer, is absent this year after leaving for a post at Aston Martin.
Chief engineer Paul Monaghan believes the squad is not far behind the leading cars, with specific goals to achieve to transform the troublesome vehicle.
“Not necessarily,” Monaghan told journalists, including RacingNews365, when asked about the apparent tension between the goals of making the car more drivable and the opposite feedback from drivers.
“How jittery or tense your car is, you might argue it’s all relative. I bet there are 18 additional cars in this pit lane that we would all struggle to drive.
“So you’re trying to get your car as balanced as possible, and we’re one or two tenths behind the quickest car on the pit lane.
“Last year’s [vehicle] had several problems, which we’ve remedied significantly without giving away too much, in my opinion. Now we need to try to make this one a little better.
“If we’re two-tenths off on a five-and-a-half-kilometer circuit with 20 or so corners, and we discover a few hundredths in each corner, we’ll suddenly be on the pace of the current lead car.
“But they’re all quite challenging. Now we only need to try to get a little more speed out of this one and increase its stability so that drivers find it simpler to drive.
“If we can do that and get some lap time in, everything will be fine. We’ll be on the search.”
