The reason why Daniel Ricciardo and Yuki Tsunoda struggled following updates to the RB over the Spanish Grand Prix has been revealed.
Between its drivers, RB amassed 28 points in the opening 10 rounds but since the Spanish Grand Prix has added only six more.
In Barcelona, both Ricciardo and Tsunoda were eliminated in Qualifying 1. The former was the better-performing driver in the race, finishing 15th and a lap down.
That performance coincided with a sizeable upgrade package that included a new engine cover, sidepod inlets, rear wing, and floor body.
“We had an update targeting certain benefits,” RB technical director Jody Egginton told Autosport.
“We’re still trying to get all the headline load improvements, but we were focusing a little bit still to get a bit more brake entry stability, a bit more rotation in the car, all the normal things.
“As a package, it was clear that we hadn’t been able to extract everything from it, and although the load that we anticipated was there, we’d sort of decoupled the car in through-corner and through-speed balance more than we wanted.
“There was no doubt that the load was in the package but, trading load against balance, we were not able to access that performance.”
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The Spanish Grand Prix was the first leg of a triple-header that took teams to the Red Bull Ring a week later.
It offered little time for RB to understand the problems it experienced, and prompted a split approach in Austria.
“We took the decision immediately to roll one car back and do a back-to-back in Austria – it was a two-stage experiment because the parc ferme window this year in sprint races opens up twice,” Egginton explained.
“We had two goes at it, bottomed it out. And then for Silverstone, we had a baseline aero config and, essentially, we’d rolled back the floor.”
Though the floor proved a misstep, it still offered useful insight, according to Egginton.
“The floor is a one-piece thing with bits of it we liked, bits of it we didn’t. You don’t get the choice to split it up,” he said.
“You bring the update to the first event, you’ve got things you want to learn, but we delved straight into it, did our washing, found the answer and moved on. So I’m quite happy with the process.
“Clearly not happy that we couldn’t access all the performance we had, which is far better than not actually realising the performance. But yeah, we’ve converged to a configuration now.
“A lot of learning from that floor that we’re not running, which we’ll apply to the next floor because some aspects of it we like,” he added.
“Most teams have [rolled back] at one point or another.
“To believe that you can attain everything is naive – if you’re trying to develop this aggressively, it’s just how it is.
“I’d be concerned if every single part got retained. I’d question that as ‘are we sure, do we want to look at that again?’ Because experimentally the likelihood of that is low.”
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