“I think we just have to wait”- Max Verstappen feels that it is too early to conclude, as Red Bull is testing on demo tyres ahead of Bahrain.
Red Bull recently released its car for 2021, and soon Sergio Perez went out for a run at Silverstone with RB15, and on Thursday, Max Verstappen and his new teammate gave a brief run to all new RB16B.
Speaking to several outlets, including the RaceFans, the Dutchman wants to avoid giving his judgement on this car, as he feels it’s a small sample size and the tyres are not the ones usually used.
“We drive on demo tyres, so it will never feel how it’s going to feel on real tyres,” Verstappen told media, including RaceFans today. “I never really base a lot of my findings on this small run. You get the car out and run a few laps.
“It all felt a bit normal to me. I think we have to wait and see what’s happening in Bahrain once we have proper tyres under the car. It’s a bit of a carry-over from last year for all teams,” said Verstappen. “I don’t think it’s going to be a completely different car anyway.
“As long as it’s fast, that’s the most important, even if it would look pink, purple or any other colour or shape that doesn’t matter. Even if it has the weirdest shape on the car possible, and it’s fast, I’m happy with that.”
Mercedes is still dominant.
Despite Red Bull closing the gap against Mercedes by the end of 2020, Verstappen feels that the reigning champions are the favourites, even if they took a hit on the floor.
“At the end of the season, Mercedes, of course, stopped developing that car from whenever – June, July – because you couldn’t really see a lot of updates. We just kept learning. We know we had a few issues with that car, and we wanted to improve it.”
“Also, knowing that the regulations wouldn’t change that much – of course, the floor changed a bit, but in general, the cars stayed pretty much the same – for us, it was important to just get on top of that.”
“Let’s see this year if we improved it even more and even better, and hopefully it’s more competitive compared to Mercedes. People always talked about the rear end being so twitchy,” he added. “I think it’s just general grip that we still lacked a bit.”
“But then also we were a bit down on power. We know that that is no secret; you can see it. So we worked a lot with Honda, of course, also throughout the winter.”
“It’s all looking promising, but it doesn’t make sense now to hype everything up. First, it’s more important to get to the track in Bahrain and try to do the best amount of learning we can on the car and the engine to optimise everything.”
