RB has struggled to understand the upgrades introduced at the Spanish Grand Prix, which had a sharp negative impact on its performance.
Barcelona was the opening round of F1’s first triple-header of 2024, giving the Italian squad precious little opportunity to fully analyse and understand what it had experienced.
That prompted a mismatched approach in Austria, which appeared to net Daniel Ricciardo a result in the race itself.
However, the squad’s form in the British Grand Prix last time out was mixed at best and, in reality, below expectations as Haas outscored it heavily in the constructors’ championship.
Having finally had a chance to draw breath since that event, where Ricciardo was 13th and team-mate Yuki Tsunoda was 10th, the Australian believes the team now understands the issue, as reflected by the package it has in Hungary this weekend.
“We might have little things here and there, but no major updates” he said of the car’s configuration for this weekend.
“I know a lot of teams are bringing some stuff this weekend, but I think we’ll have something of Silverstone, so, whatever that is; some old, a few little new bits.”
Following the Red Bull Ring, Ricciardo suggested RB downgraded its car with the Barcelona package.
However, the British Grand Prix also proved difficult with the eight-time race winner joking that he hoped the team found a hole in his car to explain the lack of pace.
It highlighted a key concern within the squad, that a potential for correlation issue had crept into its systems.
With testing heavily restricted, teams rely on a combination of computational fluid dynamics, wind tunnel data, and feedback from the simulator, then verified in the real world.
A correlation issue between the virtual and real world can create an engineering nightmare as designers are left without a reliable way of validating if a new component offers a gain.
Understanding which aspects of the Spanish GP upgrade were troublesome is critical.
“We think so,” Ricciardo admitted when asked if the team now knows which bits did deliver versus those that didn’t.
“We’ll still probably… yeah, we think so….
“I think we’ve got a good handle on it.
“They’re definitely not all the new parts, that’s for sure.”
RB remains sixth in the constructors’ championship standings with 31 points, just four clear of Haas which has amassed 20 points in the last two races.
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