Mercedes grieves: 'Red Bull is half a second faster than us'
F1 News
- GPblog.com
It was waiting until the very last day of testing. Red Bull drove out of the pit lane on Saturday morning with, among other things, modified sidepods, almost immediately set the fastest time of the week and everyone knew: the team of world champion Max Verstappen is favorite for the first Grand Prix.
Updates successful
Five out of six test days, first in Barcelona and later Bahrain, the teams were convinced that Ferrari was the strongest. After Verstappen had outperformed the competition on the sixth day, the verdict was unanimously changed, according to Auto, Motor und Sport. It was clear to the other teams that the updates had worked: in addition to the side pods - which meant that the cooling had to be adjusted - also the new base plate.
The competition immediately started to calculate. The German magazine quotes an engineer from Mercedes. "It's Red Bull ahead of Ferrari, according to our calculations we are half a second behind," it was reportedly said. A figure that was confirmed by Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko. "The upgrade gave us more than half a second."
Understeer gone
A week before the first Grand Prix at the same circuit in Bahrain, those time gains came mainly from the reduction of understeer. With the new parts, the team was able to find a better setup for the front of the car, so that the understeer disappeared.