Red Bull’s technical director Pierre Wache admitted he was not entirely happy with their progress during the first test of the new season.
The team encountered problems with their car at the end of last season which they aimed to address with their new RB21. Wache said they haven’t seen as much progress as they hoped for.
“I am not as happy as I could be because the car did not respond how we wanted at times, but it is going in the right direction, just maybe the magnitude of the direction was not as big as we expected and it’s something we need to work on for the first race and future development,” he said.
They covered the lowest mileage of any team, putting 1,645 kilometres on the RB21 compared to Mercedes’ 2,478km with their W16.
Like their rivals, Red Bull had to contend with several unusual interruptions which caused red flags over the last three days. However they also encountered some technical problems with their car which limited their running at times.
“It was not as smooth a test as we expected and the team expected, but it is better to find some problems here than later down the line and it is why we are here, to understand the car,” said Wache.
These problems were especially surprising as the car is outwardly very similar to last year’s design. Team principal Christian Horner previously indicated the RB21 has more drastic changes beneath its bodywork.
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“The weather was not with us and not very representative of this track,” Wache added, “but we tried to explore the potential of the car and tried to understand how it responds to different set-ups, and I think we more or less achieved that.”
The team heads into the new season having won two of the last four rounds of last season. Wache believes they are still in close competition with McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes at the front of the field.
“I think it’s very difficult to see a starting order for Melbourne across the grid right now, you see that four teams look quite quick, including us, but we didn’t look too much at other teams, we tried to focus on our programme.”
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