Despite encouraging tests, Pierre Waché believes Red Bull is lagging behind

With 343 laps completed during the three days of testing this week at the Sakhir circuit, Red Bull is right in the middle of the pack, despite a hydraulic issue on Thursday. The level of reliability achieved by the RB22, powered by a brand new Red Bull Powertrains Ford engine, was a source of satisfaction for Pierre Waché, the team's technical director.

“I’m very pleased to see that we’re able to get the car running, assess its performance, and see where we need to improve. The people working on the engine here have done an extraordinary job to give us the opportunity to complete so many laps.”

The downside, according to the French engineer, is that having the opportunity to use so many analytical tools to assess Red Bull's performance made him realize he was lacking a bit of performance compared to the competition! While the eleven teams on the grid are running different programs during these winter tests, the teams of F1 have numerous systems for evaluating the relative performance of each car.

“I’m not entirely satisfied, because we’re in competition, and our performance is judged in relation to that of others! Some teams are faster than us, so we need to improve. But as a starting point, it’s an excellent one. There will be a constant development cycle throughout the year, which is normal with these new rules. We have our development plan, and we’ll make changes between now and the first race of the year, but seeing what the others are doing also gives us ideas, clearly!”

Pierre Waché and his team will closely analyze the ideas brought by other teams during the final three days of testing in Bahrain, from Wednesday to Friday. The Austrian team, like many others, is expected to bring a package much closer to the one it will field in Melbourne on the weekend of March 8th, but taking ideas from the competition could help with further development.

“We’ll be evaluating an aerodynamic package next week, but that will certainly be the case for everyone. There are some interesting choices, different philosophies, so we’ll have to evaluate all of that, because some ideas came up during our development work, but we chose other paths. We’ll evaluate that because after a few more weeks of work, we can find different things. It’s very interesting to see all the different compromises on the grid.”

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