Many uncertainties for Red Bull after the three-day test in Bahrain, with the only certainty being Max Verstappen.
Red Bull left Bahrain after the three-day test with many uncertainties and very few certainties, perhaps just one: Max Verstappen. The Anglo-Austrian team, which brought a completely different car compared to last season, didn’t shine either in race pace or qualifying simulations, highlighting, in some ways, the same issues that characterized them during last year’s championship.
The one raising the alarm was none other than the technical director Pierre Wachè, who, at the end of the three-day test, made the following statements: ““It wasn’t as smooth a test as we expected and as the team expected, but it’s better to find some issues here than later on, and that’s what tests are for. The weather didn’t help us, but we tried to explore the car’s potential and understand how it responds to different setups, and I think we more or less succeeded.
I think it’s very difficult right now to predict the starting order for Melbourne on the grid. It seems like four teams are quite fast, including us, but we didn’t focus too much on the other teams. We tried to focus on our own program.”
On the third day, Red Bull brought updates that were originally planned for the first race in Australia, but they don’t seem to have had great success. Important work, therefore, awaits the engineers at the Anglo-Austrian team to try to fix the problems highlighted during the week in Bahrain. Wachè then added: “I’m not as happy as I could be because the car didn’t respond as we wanted in some moments, but it’s going in the right direction, it’s just that maybe the extent of that direction wasn’t as big as we expected, and that’s something we need to work on for the first race and for future development.”