Only one weak point
For several years, Formula 1 has not experienced such a one-way start to the championship as this season. In fact, in the first two races of 2023, Red Bull literally disintegrated its opponents, easily dominating both in Bahrain and in Jeddah and bringing home two consecutive braces. The RB19 is, in terms of speed, simply from another planet compared to its direct rivals, Mercedes and Ferrari above all. Max Verstappen’s comeback on the Saudi circuit, with the reigning world champion going from 15th to second in the space of half a race, impressed everyone above all for the ease with which it arrived. Between the Milton Keynes stable and absolute perfection though, there still seems to be a small but insidious obstacle.
Verstappen only victim so far
The reference is obviously to the reliability of Adrian Newey’s new creature. The brilliant British engineer himself after the Bahrain GP had underlined that there were real concerns about the strength of this engineering masterpiece. So far in the race, the cars of Perez and Verstappen have saved themselves from the breakdowns which occurred instead to Ferrari and Aston Martin, but this is not enough to calm the environment. Verstappen had to abandon qualifying in Jeddah due to transmission problems during Q2 and warned via radio that he feared the same problem would reoccur during the race. In general, in just two races, the two Red Bull drivers have already used two changes each and Perez has already replaced a battery and an ECU. The grid penalty starts in the third, as the Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc has already experienced.
Perez’s warning
Verstappen warned the team to be carefulgiven that the race for the world title already seems to have become a two-way deal, so that one pilot does not suffer more reliability problems than the other. But the most interesting words were those spoken by Checo Perez at the press conference after the race. In fact, the Mexican underlined how already on the Sakhir track there had been concreated fear of not reaching the checkered flag: “Reliability is the starting point – underlined the winner of Jeddah – we saw it with Aston Martin. Sooner or later it will hit us, but obviously we have to keep working on this aspect. In Bahrain we were lucky, but if we had had to push to the end we probably wouldn’t have been able to finish the race. So at the moment there are a lot of reliability issues, but let’s hope they don’t affect us anytime soon.”. The direct adversaries obviously have different auspices.
#Red #Bull #weakness #reliability #FormulaPassion