Red Bull is looking to speed ahead — with the help of its sister team, Renault and an Austrian partner called AVL.
Right now, according to Italy’s Omnicorse, a Toro Rosso car is up and running on the sophisticated AVL dynamic test bench in Graz, Austria. It follows a disastrous start to the season for Red Bull, due mainly to the problems with Renault’s supposedly-improved turbo V6 ‘power unit’ for 2015.
In reality, it is underpowered and unreliable, and even Renault is not denying it. “Reliability has been our Achilles heel since the last two races,” boss Cyril Abiteboul said after Bahrain. “But with 18 days to go before Spain, we have the time to introduce the more permanent fixes we have in the pipeline and start making the performance steps we are all keen to make.”
In the meantime, Red Bull’s Christian Horner and Dr Helmut Marko are now tempering their earlier scathing criticisms of the French supplier. But Horner admits: “We are all frustrated because we became accustomed to victory and success. “It is particularly frustrating in that it is not something within our power to fix,” he added.
And in reality, any hopes of a rapid recovery and a tilt for the 2015 title are now gone. “We can’t do anything better than third place now,” Marko, referring to the already big points gaps to Mercedes, Ferrari and to a lesser extent Williams, told the Swiss newspaper Blick.
