30/07/2020
NEWS STORY
As Red Bull continues to try and pinpoint the reason for the RB16's "unpredictability", Max Verstappen reveals that the team is bringing "a lot of new parts" to Silverstone this weekend.
While the Austrian team's 2020 contender is clearly a good car, certainly a whole lot better than the Ferrari, it is not yet capable of mounting a sustained challenge to Mercedes. Furthermore, with Racing Point constantly improving, Max Verstappen and Alex Albon could soon find themselves under pressure from the Pink Panthers. Indeed, in Hungary the (t)Racing Points locked-out the second row of the grid behind Mercedes.
At the end of a difficult weekend in Hungary, which climaxed with Verstappen spinning off into the barriers on his way to the grid, necessitating a superhuman pre-race repair job from his crew, the youngster admitted to being mystified by the unpredictability of the car.
"It's important for us now to understand where it went wrong," he told reporters, "and then, of course, correct it and try to learn from it and try to get it back on track.
"Of course, as you head into the right direction, then of course very quickly you can put a good amount of parts on the car - but first we need to really understand where the main critical problem is in the car."
Speaking at Silverstone today, the Dutchman, confirming that the RB16 is - according to Christian Horner - a "decent car" that isn't "behaving as expected", revealed that a number of new parts will be tested during tomorrow's sessions.
"We are still learning, we're bringing a lot of new parts to the car," he said. "They are different parts, to see what works, what doesn't, and where we can still improve.
"This is of course not from one week to the other that it is going to be solved," he added. "We need a bit more time for that. But we're working on it, and we'll just find out by trying it on track as well, to know if we're heading into the right direction."
Asked about closing the gap to Mercedes, he said: "Every car is hard to drive on the limit, it's just sometimes when it becomes a little bit unpredictable... that is the tricky bit.
"Honestly, in the race on Sunday I was pretty happy with the balance I had, but it's just a bit too slow at the moment. We will try to improve that.
"I go into a weekend where I always try to do the best I can," he said, when asked if he was frustrated by the gap to Mercedes. "Of course I would like to come to the weekend and know that you're going to fight for victories every weekend but at the moment that is not the case. We just try to learn and try to improve.
"Hopefully towards the end of the year or next year we can be in that position," he added. "Of course, it's not going to be easy. They work very hard at Mercedes as well but if we can make it difficult for them then that would be really nice but it's not that I am going to sit here frustrated and be angry about it all. That doesn't mean that sometimes I get a bit upset or whatever but that's how it is at the end of the day because I want to win and I want to improve.
"I think everybody at the team has that, we all want to win. It's good that we are all pushing each other hard so that's nothing negative because if I would just sit here and say 'I don't care', and just rock up to the track and just do my job and go back home then I think that would be the wrong attitude."
Check out our Thursday gallery from Silverstone, here.