Red Bull Racing arrived in Miami with a significant package of upgrades that proved highly effective. The RB22, especially in the hands of Max Verstappen, showed clear performance gains on track.
The Dutch driver himself commented after the Sprint Qualifying on Friday: “What the team brought worked. Even though our rivals also introduced updates, we managed to halve the gap to them.” A partial satisfaction, but one that hints at a brighter spring for the team led by Laurent Mekies.
The upgrades were not the only reason Verstappen was able to get much closer to the front-running pace (as seen, for example, in Saturday qualifying). In April, Red Bull also carried out a targeted intervention to address a request from Max regarding an issue that had been present since the very first laps of the Barcelona shakedown, where the four-time world champion first noticed it.
The issue concerned the steering system on the RB22 number 3. Max Verstappen had been complaining about it since the end of January, but only in April was the team finally able to make the necessary changes.
“In the first three races we mainly had steering issues. There was clearly something not right. The team was finally able to fix it and now I can at least steer normally again,” Verstappen revealed during a media session with Dutch journalists.
“I had already clearly said that something wasn’t right from the very first lap I did in the Barcelona shakedown in January. But apparently it was something complex to identify. Now, finally, it has been fixed.”
“It wasn’t simple because when you think about steering, you think of something straightforward, but there are several elements that need to come together. Even in aerodynamic terms. In the end, the entire suspension is designed to be optimal from an aerodynamic point of view, so there are always external factors involved that complicate things that may look simple on the surface.”
The problem was solved in Milton Keynes in a very pragmatic way: the entire steering column and all supporting components were replaced in order to eliminate every potential source of the issue.
From the filming day held at Silverstone at the end of April, Verstappen immediately felt a positive difference, and the same improvement was also noticeable during the Miami Grand Prix weekend.
“Fixing the problem didn’t have a bigger effect than the updates we brought, but it makes me more comfortable in the car and therefore I have more sensitivity when steering.”
Pierre Waché, Red Bull Racing’s technical director, explained that the delayed solution to the steering issue on Verstappen’s car was due to a lack of time to manufacture the required parts.
“Max’s steering issue was identified before the April break. Slightly before. But the break allowed us to produce the parts. Otherwise, if the Bahrain and Jeddah Grands Prix had taken place as scheduled, we would not have had the components needed to fix everything.”
Leave a Reply