Max Verstappen, Red Bull, Bahrain International Circuit, 2022

Red Bull say they were ‘competitive without even trying’ on day five

2022 F1 season

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Red Bull declared themselves pleased with how competitive their RB18 was on the penultimate day of testing.

Max Verstappen covered 86 laps and set the third-best time with a lap of 1’34.011. Head of race engineering Guillaume Rocquelin said they had been able to post promising lap times without wringing the maximum from their car.

“It was more of a stop-start day today, mostly by design,” he explained. “We had a good continuous run yesterday, so today was more about exploring and testing different things.

“We spent more time in the garage making changes to the car and also taking more risks. We learned a lot and gathered a lot of information today.

“I’m quite happy with what we found out, we are progressing in different directions and it’s all very positive. We were reasonably competitive at the end without even trying.”

Sergio Perez revealed the team will bring further upgrade parts to its car for the final day of testing tomorrow, when he will share driving duties with his team mate.

Verstappen said he wasn’t drawing any conclusions about the team’s performance after setting his best time on C4 tyres, which have not seen selected for next week’s race at the Bahrain International Circuit.

“We did as good a job as we could today,” he said, “it was very warm and there were quite a few red flags. It was quite a good day, all pretty standard and we put quite a good amount of laps on the car. We won’t really use these tyre compounds for the race so again, it’s not really representative.”

He had a brief on-track encounter with Carlos Sainz Jnr, who set the quickest time of the day while all cars were lapping.

“It was fun to have a little battle with Carlos,” said Verstappen. “I think he was on a long run with more fuel and I was on a shorter run and once I caught him he started using DRS, I think he wanted to race as well.”

“So far the car is pretty good but there are always areas to work on,” he added.

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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8 comments on “Red Bull say they were ‘competitive without even trying’ on day five”

  1. I doubt Red Bull’s goal is to be “competitive” with Ferrari.

  2. Yeah I still get the impression RBR are amongst the ones least affected by porpoising. Just haven’t heard much on that from them nor have I seen video of them bouncing, not that I have looked really hard for vids. Anybody have anything on that for RBR?

    1. @robbie I’d have a guess that if anyone would be on top of it, Newey would be.

      That being said, I doubt they’ve actually given their car full beans yet so some might get exposed then but there’s certainly not been any reports of major issues yet.

      1. @dbradock Yeah I listened to a podcast from one Dieter and as he said Newey is old enough to be familiar with ground effects from the past but young enough to apply today’s technology to it, so it sure will be fascinating to see how they do once racing and how they evolve it as well.

  3. Certainly looked like Max was trying anyway

  4. In the words of Mandy Rice-Davis, “He would say that, wouldn’t he?”

  5. Horner is right.
    Watching the winter testing and how the drivers are handling the car, I can see Perez and Verstappen being very comfortable driving the car. Another Newey masterpiece. Same goes for Ferrari and McLaren cars.
    Now, even though Mercs are known for sandbagging, I see the same I saw in the last year’s winter testing. Hamilton and Russel (Bottas last year) are fighting the car, so I think they will strugle a bit in the beggining. Hopefully they will catch up soon. Also the porpoising in Mercs and Alpha Tauri seems ro be the worst.
    I am sure they will be competitive in the race, but I feel RBR is ahead again with a good margin. Even Ferrari and McLaren, seems ro be ahead.
    Better for the show.

    1. Expect Mercedes claw a lot performance back at the first race.

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