Pierre Waché explains: This is what Red Bull Racing’s upgrade is worth

The build-up to the home race at the Red Bull Ring was not without its worries for the Red Bull Racing team. A number of problems cropped up as early as the first practice session, costing them a lot of time. And in the second session, too, there were a number of complaints from Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar over the radio. Pierre Waché, however, remained unfazed.

The technical director of the Milton Keynes-based team knows: “That can happen when you make so many changes to the car.” He was referring to the extensive update his team had prepared for the race in Styria. This included changes to the sidepods, the engine cover, the underbody and the rear suspension. Modifications were also made to the rear wing and the exhaust.

Waché did not go into detail about the problems after the first two hours of practice, and, referring to the test programme, explained: “We tried to understand the car and the new package, and made a few adjustments for the second practice session.” Not all the changes had the desired effect. “Some worked, others didn’t go in the right direction,” confirmed the engineer.

“We still have some work to do, and that’s to be expected when you change a few things on the car. We still have a lot to learn about it, and we hope we’ll find a good way forward ahead of qualifying,” added Waché. And he gave a positive interim assessment: “It’s hard to say whether the whole package delivers exactly what we expected. We can’t say how it will compare to the others, as we only know our own package. But we’re quite happy with it. It’s hard to say where we’ll end up on Sunday. In race trim, the performance looked promising if we take the performance in Barcelona as a benchmark. However, we need to improve on a flying lap. That’s what we’ll be focusing on.”

In the third free practice session on Saturday morning, Max Verstappen’s gap to the fastest time was significantly smaller than the previous day. At the end of Friday’s practice sessions, the four-time world champion was still five-tenths of a second off the pace. In the third session, the gap was down to just 0.273 seconds.

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