Adrian Newey: We didn’t properly understand the car

Red Bull’s Chief Technical Officer Adrian Newey has explained how he and the team struggled to understand the RB8 throughout the early stages of the 2012 season, which saw an amazing seven different winners in the first seven races. Both Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber won a race in the first seven, but struggled to dominate.

After a season in which Red Bull utterly annihilated the opposition, with Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber taking a combined eighteen pole positions and twelve victories in 2011, the first seven races of 2012 was somewhat refreshing as seven different drivers took victory, including two new winners in Nico Rosberg and Pastor Maldonado. During this early stage of the year, Red Bull’s results were rather erratic with both Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber struggling to return to their former dominance of the previous season.

“We didn’t have the level of consistency we wanted [at the start of the season] and as an engineer that was very frustrating because the truth is we didn’t properly understand the car and what was happening so it’s not just we weren’t fully competitive, it’s that lack of understanding which personally I found very frustrating.” Explained Adrian Newey, Red Bull’s Chief Technical Officer. “So it’s been tough to understand the car, understand what we should do, how to get it to work consistently.”

Despite the tough start to the season for Red Bull, the team struck gold towards the end of the year as Sebastian Vettel and the team enjoyed a resurgence of competitiveness which saw the German driver storm to four race victories at Singapore, Japan, Korea and India. This enabled him to return to the top of the Championship, and eventually secure his third Drivers’ Crown at the Brazilian Grand Prix. However, Sebastian Vettel also found the start of the season exceedingly tough.

“It was an incredible amount of work and a tough year.” Added Sebastian Vettel, “Especially the first few races, I think we always had a car that was good enough to come in first, but that last bit was missing, I didn’t feel quite as comfortable as I did two years ago, maybe I was missing that last bit of trust, that I couldn’t play with the car and drive it like I did before. But finally I made that first step, first in Valencia and later in Singapore where I began to feel more and more that I could manipulate the car again in a way that made me feel more comfortable with it and I think the results began to come together, at that point we were really really fast, and the last few races were definitely the turning point for us when things really started moving forward and we were able to consistently score points.”

One of the major factors for Red Bull’s loss in performance from 2011 to 2012 was the ban on the exhaust blow diffuser, which the Austrian outfit had been perfecting for the last two seasons. This not only included their exhaust layout, but also their engine mapping and design of the car. Once the new regulations were implemented, the ace up Red Bull’s sleeve was removed as the team was forced to revise their exhaust system.

“The big change for us over the winter was the exhaust system.” Continued Adrian Newey, “For two years we developed side exhausts that helped to blow the diffuser, gave us lots of down force, then we developed the engine mapping to maximise that effect. That was taken away over the winter. I think that really set us back because as I said we have been on it for two years, we developed a long way down that route, and we designed that 2011 car completely around that philosophy so everything on the car was designed around that system. When it was taken away from us, it was a big step backwards, not only in terms of simply removing it, but the understanding that we generated over the last couple of years had suddenly been thrown away and we had to start again.”

Although Red Bull suffered a tough start to the season, normality was certainly resumed towards the end of the season as Sebastian Vettel and Red Bull were able to retain their respective Championship crowns after a thrilling season finale at Sao Paulo’s Interlagos circuit. After the unpredictable start to the season back in March, Red Bull will be hoping to start the 2013 season next year in dominant fashion once again. However, McLaren, Ferrari, Mercedes and even Lotus could well prove to be tough competition.

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