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After expressing concerns about Red Bull Racing’s potential performance ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix, Christian Horner’s worries have become true following first and second practice at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal.
In an interview at the end of May, Horner admitted that Canada was shaping up to be a difficult weekend for the Milton Keynes based team and former champions of Formula 1’s V8 era, mainly due to their lack of power by using an underpowered Renault engine.
In order to overcome this issue, the Red Bull team began the weekend by testing new parts on Daniel Ricciardo’s car in practice one, applying new components and fins around the bargeboards and side pods of the RB13 and testing them by fitting an aero rake to the car, allowing the team to map the airflow caused by the wake of the front tyre.
Despite the team testing the new parts in order to reduce drag on the heavily power reliant circuit, there appeared to be no major performance gain, with Ricciardo being over half a second slower than Max Verstappen who was not running the new parts, meaning that the team ended the session in seventh and ninth place.
In practice two, the story was much the same, with Red Bull once again struggling. Reliability also played a role in the session, with an engine issue halting Ricciardo’s running early on in the session. This was an issue that proved to be terminal, with Horner later revealing that it looks like the engine has been lost entirely. Issues also plagued the other side of the garage for Verstappen when the Dutchman stopped out on track with 20 minutes to go following a gearbox failure, bringing out the red flag.
This disrupted Red Bull’s long distance running in the session, which means that the team have a lower understanding of the ultrasoft, supersoft, and soft tyre that are available for use this weekend know little about the durability of each compound around the circuit.
Red Bull Racing currently lie in third place in the Constructors’ Championship, 99 points behind Ferrari, the current leaders, having secured two podiums so far in the first six races of 2017. With the next two Grand Prix in Azerbaijan and Austria also being power circuits, the coming races for Red Bull are not looking promising, which may well promote questions as to weather Force India could close in on the team to take third place in the standings.
Chris Soulsby
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