Sebastian Vettel remains confident that the Red Bull RB10 will improve despite ongoing problems for his team in Bahrain today.
Vettel stopped on circuit after an issue with the rear brakes locked the rear wheels, and a minor fire ensued. The team insisted that issues had been addressed since Jerez, and that a new problem cropped up today.
“Obviously we’re not happy with where we are right now, but we’ve still got a long way ahead of us,” said Vettel. “It’s fairly difficult to judge where we are. I haven’t had much of the car yet. The first gut feel is OK, but surely we need more running to judge the car, to judge reliability, to judge general performance.
“It’s not easy to find a quick fix, but I think we understand the problems. As I said it’s not that easy to find the solution for the problems we found. We fixed the problems from [Jerez], we had a problem with temperature, which we seemed to fix, at least with the couple of laps we could do. But very often you fix one problem, and another problem pops up.
“There’s stuff to do on the Red Bull Racing side, in terms of reliability, temperatures, general around the car. And there’s stuff on the Renault side. But it’s not fair to separate those two. We are a team, and we’ve been very successful in the last years together. Now it’s obviously not the start we were hoping for, but we’ve obviously got some time, and clever people on board, which hopefully can fix the problems.”
Asked if this was a strange situation for him to have a bad car, Vettel pointed that it would be wrong to write off RBR in terms of competitiveness, because the car hasn’t yet run shown its potential.
“It’s more strange not to know how good the car is – we might have the best car, I don’t know. We can say that it’s not the most reliable right now, but that’s what testing is for. It’s zero points for everyone.
“Surely all the homework you get done in the winter testing helps you, certainly at the beginning of the season, because you don’t need to catch up. We’ve still got some days left. I think we know what is going on, but as you can see it’s not that easy to fix, otherwise we wouldn’t volunteer to do only 14 laps.”