Red Bull suffer disastrous end to testing

After suffering a disastrous end to the final week of pre-season testing, which included a gearbox issue and an incident for reigning World Champion Sebastian Vettel, Red Bull will be hoping for less issues for the season opening Australian Grand Prix.

After flying out new upgrades for their car in time for the final two days of testing in Barcelona, the team would have been hoping for a productive end to the test. Instead, Red Bull were restricted to only 23 laps all day, in comparison to McLaren and Ferrari’s 115 laps.

Reigning World Champion Sebastian Vettel admitted it was a tough day for the team, and that it will be hard to judge the updates due to the lack of running time.

"We would love to be on the circuit more, but this morning I had an issue.” Explained Vettel during the lunch break yesterday, “I went off track and broke the front wing and had to come in, and it took quite a while to get back out and just before lunch we suffered a problem with the gearbox so we have to fix it and get back out after lunch."

When Sebastian Vettel was asked about the potential pecking order for the first couple of races, the German was quick to snub any belief that Red Bull could be second best behind the likes of McLaren.

Red Bull will be using the 10 days before FP1 at the Australian Grand Prix to sort out their reliability issues, and will be hoping for a successful start to the 2012 season, void of any of the troubles they received during testing.