Red Bull got in trouble because they spent more money than the rules said they should. They were fined $7 million and not allowed to do aerodynamic tests for 12 months since October 2022. Even though this made them worse off than the other teams, Red Bull still won the first three races of the year.
Vasseur said that the penalty issued to Red Bull wasn’t a big deal. He explained that most teams improved their cars aerodynamically by one second, but Red Bull only got penalized for around a tenth of this improvement because it’s not a linear progression. This meant that they could use the money elsewhere instead.
When asked whether the team had done a good job in responding to the penalty or if it wasn’t severe enough, he answered “yes” to both. He also believes that the punishment wasn’t tough enough for what happened.
In addition, he pointed out that taking into account their rate of development throughout the season, and the 10% balance at the end, there was an effect on the performance as well.
You can use the money you save from the wind tunnel to reduce weight somewhere else. However, that effect might not be very strong. And another problem is that by spending more money on the car last year, you have an advantage at this start of this season. Even though those who designed the car did a good job, it doesn’t mean they did an amazing job.
Laurent Mekies and Frederic Vasseur from Scuderia Ferrari think that the penalty they got is too light. They know that their car, the RB19, runs faster than any competitor’s when its DRS system (a type of speed booster) is open. This has caught the attention of other teams’ drivers.
The speaker noted that the other team had a really big advantage against everyone else. Last year they were able to make up some of the gap, but there’s still more room to improve.
Mercedes is working on some upgrades to their suspension to help improve Lewis Hamilton’s performance. Red Bull has done better during the races than they have in practice sessions, which Ferrari is struggling to match.
In the first three events that we know about, even though it wasn’t all the tracks available, we thought that if we worked hard enough, than we could compete for the top spots in qualifying. However, it was a lot harder in the actual race.
The advantage in the race in Melbourne was not as big, compared to other numbers that have been analyzed. This is probably because of the driver’s ability to drive the car at its limit with different levels of fuel, and different types of tires. If the car is too “peaky” it can be managed for one lap on new tires, but not when there are already five sets of soft tires used during qualifying.
“It’s been a bit challenging for everyone running the race lately and we have made some changes in the last couple of weeks to try and make things better.”
