'Red Bull Racing's secrecy about RB16B is pointless'
F1 News
- GPblog.com
Red Bull Racing presented the RB16B, the car with which Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez hope to take on Mercedes in 2021. To the disappointment of fans and media, they were very cautious in giving away any information. Apart from two computer generated images we have not seen anything of the car yet.
Moreover, those images did not even show the whole car and considering the fact that AlphaTauri also presented their car with an old nose, it is questionable whether we see the real RB16B in those pictures. Also at the Silverstone test we only got images of the old RB15.
Red Bull Racing sells its fans short
This is to the dismay of Michael Schmidt, journalist at Auto Motor und Sport. He and his editors decided not to cooperate with Red Bull's secrecy and therefore did not publish any images of Sergio Perez making his first metres in the RB15. He finds Red Bull's secrecy particularly unfriendly to the fans, especially since there is no reason to be secretive at all this season.
"Playing hide and seek was understandable in other years, when opponents had the freedom to copy everything. But in 2021 that is useless. Teams have already used their tokens. The need to switch to the car for 2022 as soon as possible, the time in the wind tunnel that has been reduced and the budget ceiling make it almost impossible to copy on a large scale," Schmidt said.
Even if Red Bull had come up with something really special, he believes they would have had exclusivity on it until the end of the season. And if Red Bull only does this to cover up some aerodynamic details, the other teams might as well have it on their car after the test and before the first race.