Red Bull are confident they can take the title fight to Ferrari at the next race in Saudi Arabia despite neither car finishing the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix yesterday.
Defending champion Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez almost simultaneously suffered a fuel issue in the dramatic dying moments of the race to give them a double DNF and leave them bottom of the constructors’ championship.
Despite the early setback after having looked the strongest package on the grid in winter testing, both Verstappen and team principal Christian Horner predicted the team would bounce back next weekend.
Verstappen said: “The pace is there. We fought for pole and we fought for the race win. That is not a big problem.”
Verstappen had been in second place at the time he was forced to pull into the pits with Perez in fourth, which equated to 30 points lost as Ferrari took a maximum haul of 34 to lay down the gauntlet early in 2022.
Amid the loss of points, Horner insisted he was still upbeat about the team’s chances when the racing resumes in Jeddah.
“It’s a disappointing day but an encouraging performance,” he said. “We saw Ferrari were quick but we have a very competitive car. To be fighting for the win was encouraging.
“To lose a podium and a good haul of points so close to the end of races is always frustrating but it’s a long season, there’s 23 races and we’ve got a quick car.”
Red Bull will spend the coming days trying to identify the exact problem and ensure the team avoids another costly double retirement in race two.
Horner said the team needed “to understand the DNFs and address that in time for next week” while Verstappen said reliability rather than pace would be the key with the clock ticking to the next round of the 2022 championship. He said: “The pace was not quite what I hoped for compared to Friday but it’s the first race weekend and sometimes you don’t get the balance you would like. We need to understand the issues today and work on the car continuously to improve.”
As well as the fuel issue, Verstappen struggled with a steering problem, he could not push on his tyres in the immediate aftermath of the pitstops and was hampered by overheating brakes which eventually caused him to back off in the early fight for the lead with Leclerc from laps 17 to 19.
Thanks to Red Bull’s failure to finish in Bahrain, Mercedes benefited with a podium for Lewis Hamilton in third and fourth place for George Russell, who said he was hopeful the team would find a quick solution to their problems, which could catapult them towards the front of the grid.
“If we unlock this performance, it will help everything,” he said. “We really hope we can find this solution as soon as possible. We know it will answer a lot of our issues. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
