“I’m p***** off with that”- Red Bull chief upset with missed opportunity against Mercedes

“I’m p***** off with that”- Red Bull chief is upset with a missed opportunity handed against Mercedes during the 2020 season.

Mercedes, over the years, managed to irk everyone with their consistent wins. Among all, Red Bull and Ferrari are the most riled up entourages, who are not able to break the status-quo despite having near to equal resources.

Red Bull defeating Mercedes only twice out of 17 opportunities has frustrated the team’s chief engineer Pierre Wache, who claims that they couldn’t push their rivals despite closing the gaps.

“We missed an opportunity because I think they [Mercedes] were beatable,” he told Motorsport Magazine. “If we’d found what we find now on the car, we’d beat them. I’m p***** off with that, and I think we are all on the same page.

“They did a good job, to be fair, no DNF etc. But they are not everywhere perfect, and I think we can find more performance than them, even with the engines as they were. They are beatable.”

Should have bothered more

Red Bull indeed improved during the last phase of the season, and much courtesy goes to the improvement the team made over the chassis and aerodynamics changes made in 2020, and it terrified Mercedes for a while.

“Moving away from your current position on anything that works is fraught with peril,” said Mercedes chief engineer James Alisson. “It’s a frightening thing to do because when you change from your current concept to go off in a different direction.”

“You are almost certainly going to spend quite a long time worse – slower than your current concept because you’ve put a lot of effort into your current concept and nearly all the movements away from there will initially be worse.”

“And it’s very hard to be very brave in jumping to a new configuration because you fear you’re just going to never catch even if you’re eventually on a better concept. You’re going to be behind by the amount of time you’ve spent learning how to use that new concept.”

“So that tends to make teams stick year after year after year with what they’ve got.”

About the author

Tanish Chachra

Tanish Chachra is the Motorsport editor at The SportsRush. He saw his first race when F1 visited India in 2011, and since then, his romance with the sport has been seasonal until he took up this role in 2020. Reigniting F1's coverage on this site, Tanish has fallen in love with the sport all over again. He loves Kimi Raikkonen and sees a future world champion in Oscar Piastri. Away from us, he loves to snuggle inside his books.

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