ringo wrote: ↑22 May 2024, 16:32
I think the car is not hard to setup. The team just gets complacent on studying the car during practice to tweak the setup. Hard tyre information was lacking in this case.
The other thing is the qualifying. The RB20 is better at it than RB19, and this may be because of the setup to get the car in the window for qualifying which in turn may not be the right setup for the light fuel stint on the harder compound.
So I don't think redbull have any difficulties. It's all down to the choices and decisions made over the weekends.
Complacency will naturally be present, no matter how a team denies it. You need pressure from another team to create a reference point to truly push. With no reference point, then how good is good enough?
It's not complacency, otherwise they would never have achieved the run they had last year. They were forced to, again, reduce the wing level to be able to put both the floor and suspension in the right window, this is the most important chassis performance aspect of these cars. This undoubtedly cost them a bit in finding optimal race setup, more so on Hards. Why this happened again on a bumpy track with various cornering speeds (like Australia) is something the simulator team needs to look at. Maybe the internal struggle resulted in reduced infrastructure investments, leaving them with outdated simulator equipment?
Agreed on Q pace and compromise with R pace, they actually repeated a few times last year they need to improve the Q and reduce the performance gap between Q and R pace.