Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies has admitted that the issue the team has faced at the start of races won’t be fixed until next season. This comes after Isack Hadjar called for the clutch to be redesigned following a difficult start to his United States Grand Prix.
The Red Bull driver dropped from third to fifth as the lights turned off at the start of the Austin race, with Hadjar blaming “clutch over delivery”. To make matters worse, both he and team-mate Max Verstappen suffered from radio issues, with the latter joking that the team should “start communicating in sign language”.
Mekies was asked whether Hadjar was right when he said his team was good at fixing complex issues, but not “silly things”.
“I think there is some truth in what Isack is saying, meaning we are all frustrated to struggle for the second race in a row with the radio issues,” he told the media. “It’s making everyone’s lives very difficult, so it is true that it’s something that we would like to fix quite quickly because it’s an item that should be working without using too much of our energy, so he’s right on that one.”
The starts, he said, are a more substantial problem.
“The start is a slightly more complex issue to solve, meaning that the start performance is going across pretty much all the departments of the company, probably except aerodynamic. It’s engine, it’s gearbox, it’s clutch, it’s many things, and we certainly have seen from the beginning of the season that we are not the benchmark in term of launch performance.”
He said the team’s improved pace has made its race starts more noticeable.
“And you may remember how bad our starts were at the beginning of the year. We are still not the benchmark. And yes, the fact that the car in the meantime improved a lot and is fighting closer to the front makes that deficit even more painful now because competition around us is very strong.”
Isack Hadjar, Red Bull Racing
Photo by: Liam Fabre
But for a full fix, fans of the team will have to wait.
“So to your point, on one side I’m confident that we will continue to reduce the gap to the competition from now to the end of the year because every race we learn, every race we come up with small ways to close the gap. On the other side, I equally know that we will not be the benchmark before the end of the season, that it will require some significant design and hardware changes, and that this is something that we will see only next year.”
On the radio problems, the Frenchman admitted that they don’t understand where the issue stems from.
“If we were understanding it we would have solved it, so we don’t fully understand why we are being hit by these issues. Certainly I have to admit that competition is doing a better job than us because we can obviously hear everyone’s radio, and we have been struggling more than what we would have liked to.”
We want your opinion!
What would you like to see on Motorsport.com?
– The Motorsport.com Team
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: motorsport.com
