Red Bull has brought a small floor revision for the RB20 to the Azerbaijan GP as the first step of its reaction to a disappointing Italian GP.
Max Verstappen qualified seventh and finished sixth at Monza, complaining about the tricky balance of the car, and calling it a “monster”.
Verstappen said on Thursday that lessons had been learned, while conceding that it would take time for the results to work their way through the system.
The initial floor mod did make it in time for Baku, with the team’s official submission to the FIA noting that there were “changes applied to improve the pressure gradients along the floor to improve the flow locally and downstream in all conditions.”
RBR chief engineer Paul Monaghan noted that the team had “licked our wounds” as it tried to get to the bottom of the issues.
“We’re not going to sit still from his comments or our performance in Monza and do nothing to bring here and hope,” he said when asked by this writer about Verstappen’s comments about lessons being learned.
“There are many ways to address the car’s behaviour from Monza, and it touches all the aspects of the car, not just whether we revise a floor geometry or a wing geometry.
“So it would be naive of us to think that we can just leave it. So we’ve licked our wounds, learned our lessons. The proof in the pudding will be, obviously Sunday, but we’ve tried to bring changes to the car, and make it better.
“And we don’t want to watch Monza again. It wasn’t the most pleasant event for us, so we’d like to improve relative for our position.”
He added: “We’ve got to look at why has the car been better prior to Zandvoort and Monza? Was it us? Was it our opposition? Is it combination of the two?
“I think we have to look upon ourselves, because we can’t influence what our opposition does, and try to make our car better, and that’s what we’re trying to do.
“It’s all about putting together the package that Max can drive, feels confident in. Look at the first few races of the season, ‘Oh, you’re not going to get caught.’
“And here we are in a bit of a fight. So between Max and Checo and the whole team, not just what you see here, the question is can we put together a car that can defend the titles?”
Monaghan indicated that the Baku revision is a first step given the time constraints, and that there’s more to come in Singapore next weekend.
“The lessons are kind of ongoing, and the immediate reaction tends to be at the later races,” he said. “So it’s a testament to everybody that we got it here. A lot of hard work, and that hard work will continue. Singapore’s only a week away.
“So it that will be potentially another evolution for us. The scale of the update kind of determines the phase lag in there.
“So if we’ve managed to do it for this race, it’s not the biggest one we’ll ever undertake in terms of geometry change. It’s subtle. Could the effect be good? Yes. And I think the proof in the pudding will be on Sunday afternoon.”
The unusual three week gap after Singapore gives the team time to make bigger changes to Austin, but Monaghan conceded that the sprint format means it won’t be the deail place to introduce updates.
“It gives us the freedom to potentially do more,” he said of the gap. “The disciplined approach is to say is it valuable enough to spend the money to do it, to take it to Austin?
“And don’t forget, Austin’s a sprint race, so you’re going to roll the dice in P1 and then, okay, yes, no, indifferent? Keep it, not keep it?
“But that then leaves us potentially with few of any one piece. So your choices for Austin are team dependent, and somewhat confidence dependent.”
Adam Cooper F1 