23/02/2007
NEWS STORY
David Coulthard has admitted that there are problems with the Red Bull RB3, the first car that former Williams and McLaren design guru Adrian Newey has created for the Austrian team.
Lack of serious mileage caused by numerous reliability issues have resulted in widespread speculation that all is not well within the team, despite the Scot topping the timesheets on the final day of the recent test at Barcelona, the same day that (Red Bull boss) Dietrich Mateschitz chose to visit the Spanish track to watch his team(s) in action.
The Scot, along with teammate Mark Webber, has consistently been at the wrong end of the timesheets, leading many to believe that the problems are a little more serious than ill-fitting seats.
"At the moment we're not going to achieve the goals I had for the year," Coulthard told Formula1.com. "But we've got some more time to develop and hopefully, once we've done that, we can try and achieve them.
"The current things we are working on are the gearbox, overall reliability and basically building our relationship with Renault and learning about its electronic systems," he admitted. "The package is not yet optimised so we've got a lot of work to do to get the performance we want."
It's understood that the Austrian team is hoping to get in an additional two more days of testing before heading to Melbourne for the season opener. The Austrian team had previously intended concluding its pre-season schedule in Bahrain.