Red Bull Racing has reached the mid-point of the season in fine form, with consecutive onetwofinishes in the British and German Grands Prix. Red Bull Racing Team Principal, ChristianHorner and Red Bull Technology Chief Technical Officer, Adrian Newey explain thegroundwork that went into producing these results. The team currently lies second in both theConstructors’ and Drivers’ Championships.
Christian Horner, Team PrincipalAs we go into the second half of the season are the pressures you now have to dealwith different to those of last year, or even at the start of this season?The rewards on track are different, but the pressures are the same. We are working as hardas possible to get as much performance as possible, as quickly as we can. Everyone at thefactory has a spring in their step at the moment, even if the pace of development required tomeet this year’s major regulation change has been relentless. There are a lot of unsung heroesat the factory, putting in superhuman efforts and hours to get the components on the car.
How has the operation at Milton Keynes changed, to produce the performances we haveseen so far this season?
There were already signs of a change last year, when RB4 delivered reasonableperformance in the first half of the season, while in the second half Red Bull Technology had goodresults with Toro Rosso, in what was essentially an identical car. The design group has reallygelled and is working cohesively and the integration across the whole group, R&D and theproduction side, is working very well. This is down to stability and continuity in what is still arelatively young team.
The race team at the track seems to be working well too and it features lots of new faces.What effect has that had on performance?
The faces new to the race team are not new to the company, as they were all on the testteam last year. It’s a testimony to how strong the test team was that, when we conducted thedifficult exercise over the winter when as all the other teams we had to make redundancies, wewent through a scrupulously fair system to identify the best candidates for the roles we hadavailable. The group of guys in the garage are brilliant. The camaraderie between the two carcrews and the way they work for each other is fantastic; the team spirit is very strong this year.
Does the team have any weak points?
You can always do better. Putting aside our performance and two dominant one-two finishesin the last two races, the team’s determination to continue to improve and not to take anything forgranted is very important. There are no obvious weaknesses in our armoury, but as a group wemust continue to push ourselves in all areas all the time.
Going back a few races, what do you remember about standing on an F1 podium for thefirst time after the win in China?
It was a very proud moment representing Red Bull at the team’s first win, having been heresince the beginning. Looking down and seeing the faces of all the guys looking up at the podiumand standing next to the two drivers who’d driven brilliantly is a moment I will certainly alwaysremember. It was a great feeling, especially at the end of such a long race of almost two hours,held in atrocious conditions.
At the start of the season, Mark Webber, partly because of his cycling accident, was beingpositioned as something of an underdog up against new boy Vettel. What do you think aboutthat?
Our drivers are both at the top of their game at different stages in their career and they arepushing one another very hard. I think we’ve got the best driver line-up in F1 at the moment. When Isaw Mark in early January, he’d forgotten to mention he’d also broken his shoulder! He couldn’t putany weight on his right leg and I remember thinking ‘this is going to be interesting!’ He was resolute inhis determination to drive the new car at its launch. After he drove RB5 for the first time, there was alook of relief in his eyes, as I think he was unsure if he would still have the same feeling in his rightfoot and how he would cope with the bumps on track. From then on, there was never any doubt hewas going to be fit for Melbourne. In typical Aussie fashion, he carried the injury without letting onabout how much pain and discomfort he was feeling. He’s had great support and his physios andtrainers have done a great job. I think it’s only now we are seeing Mark at the level of fitness he wasat prior to his injury and his recent results show he is absolutely on the form of his life. Sebastian isundoubtedly a star in the making. He shows remarkable maturity, given his lack of experience. He isa prodigious talent who will continue to get better. The best is yet to come from him. Both men arebeing treated with total fairness within the team and are supplied with identical equipment.
At what point will you have to think about team orders between the two drivers in terms of thechampionship?
We will continue to support both drivers equally. There’s only a point and a half between them,so obviously they are both in contention for the Drivers’ Championship. There’s a long way to go tocatch up with Jenson Button. If and when we reach a point where there is a significant gap, or itbecomes mathematically impossible for one of them to challenge for the Championship, then they areboth team players and one of them will play a supporting role should it be required. Our intention is tosee both of them catch the lead Brawn as quickly as possible.
Adrian Newey, Chief Technical Officer, Red Bull Technology
RB5 was good enough to give the Brawn a run for its money even before the scramble toproduce a double diffuser. How much did the work involved in fitting a double diffuser to ourcar upset the planned development programme?
It was a huge amount of work as the car wasn’t designed to work with a double diffuser and, inparticular, it wasn’t an easy marriage with the pullrod rear suspension. We decided we didn’t have theresources to redesign the gearbox and rear suspension to better suit the double diffuser concept, sowe kept the existing mechanical package and adapt as best we could. The first attempt was ourMonaco package, which was a small step that didn’t work as well as we would have liked. Thesecond step was then introduced for the British Grand Prix.
Did this affect the overall development programme of the car?
It took up a lot of my time and during that intensive two month period I was less involved with therest of the car than I would normally have been. But we were able to handle our usual development inparallel.
Red Bull Racing and indeed all the other teams, have brought in new developments with notesting. Does this mean that testing has been something of a red herring over the past yearsor would this year’s cars be much quicker if testing had continued as before?
It’s difficult to say. When you introduce something without testing, you are reliant on your researchtools: wind tunnel testing primarily, CFD and simulation to a lesser extent. As we are now introducingnew elements at race weekends, if we have stepped in the wrong direction by a small amount, it’shard to notice, as we are unable to do back-to-back testing to quite the same level as we used to. Butwe do use the Fridays of a grand prix as a test session, as well as for preparation for the rest of theweekend.
Is tyres the one area where you really feel the lack of testing, as we have seen some unusualsituations on the tyre side so far this year?
Some of what we have seen with tyres this season has been very circuit and temperature specific.If your tests are not at the circuits you race on, or at the temperatures you encounter at the raceweekend, then the problems with the tyres might not necessarily show up.
Leaving aside the Brawns, who do you expect to mount a serious challenge over the next fewraces?
I think anybody can. We saw McLaren and Renault make a big step forward at the Nuerburgringand we ourselves made a step forward at Silverstone. As teams introduce new packages, it’spossible for them to make a good step forward – that has been a trademark of the season so far andmay well continue to be so for the rest of the year.
At the moment, it seems likely that Red Bull Racing will have to persevere with developmentof this year’s car right to the end of the season if it is in the fight for both titles. What effectwill that have on the 2010 car?
It’s a problem we face every year. Last year, research carried out on RB4 for the balance of lastseason had no application to the 2009 car because of the regulation change. That is not the case thisyear; development parts we find for RB5 will be applied to RB6 and possibly even vice versa as westart to research RB6.
Are you surprised to see where Red Bull Racing is now in the championship? Did you expectthings to be going this well?
We made reasonable progress through the last couple of years which, for Red Bull Technology,culminated in the win at Monza last year. Then, with the big change in regulations, we had theopportunity to do something new and different and possibly steal a march on more establishedcompetitors. Last year, we continued to develop RB4 and TR3 fairly aggressively right through thesummer. Other teams abandoned their 08 car somewhat earlier. Given our resources, that did stretchus quite thin last summer. We managed it as best we could and split up our development teams. Wewere probably one of the latest starters on the 09 car. We managed to find a few novel features thathave helped to make the car competitive and from then on it’s been a case of developing it.
On a personal note, you looked quite emotional standing on the Silverstone podium after theone-two finish in the British GP. How did that feel?
To be honest, the three months leading up to Silverstone had been very hard work, as wedeveloped the car to adapt it to the double diffuser. So to see that, as a package, make the differenceat Silverstone was a great feeling.
