Red Bull isn’t giving up on closing the gap to Mercedes but admits having to fix some “anomalies” with the RB16.
Last weekend, the Anglo-Austrian team surprised everyone by struggling around the Hungaroring, typically one of its strongest circuits due to the emphasis on downforce.
The main complaint from their drivers has been a lack of predictability from the car and, in qualifying, this was highlighted by Max Verstappen only managing seventh-fastest behind both Ferrari and Racing Point and 1.4s off the pole time set by Lewis Hamilton.
“We have some anomalies with a car that isn’t behaving as we expected it to,” team boss Christian Horner revealed.
“A great deal of work is going into understanding that and addressing that for future races. So [Verstappen’s] recovery [to P2 in the race] I thought was very strong, but still, Mercedes have quite a lot of pace in hand as we see.”
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Such has been the dominance of Mercedes that many believe they might be unwatchable both in 2020 and 2021 when the chassis and other key parts will be retained and aero development limited by a token system.
But the Red Bull boss isn’t throwing in the towel just yet.
“I think we’ve got something misbehaving aerodynamically,” he said. “It’s obviously a matter of understanding that and addressing that because, in certain conditions, the car is behaving as expected.
“It’s a significant gap, but it depends on how much performance we can unlock on RB16.
“We know that we’ve got the fundamental basics of a decent car here. It’s just not behaving as our simulation tools predict that it will.
“We need to understand that and make sure that we’re achieving what it should be doing, which hasn’t been the case. I think there’s a lot of good data from this weekend, and the team’s working very hard to understand it and get on top of it.”