Team Red Bull looking to improve

RED Bull team chief Christian Horner is confident they will improve on recent poor form in today’s Austrian Grand Prix at their “home” track, the Red Bull Ring.

Horner said he believes that Red Bull have fixed the problems that wrecked their hopes at the European Grand Prix in Baku where they suffered with tyre performance issues.

And he hopes the team can improve their record at the Austrian event where the circuit name demands a stronger showing.

“The focus of the last two weeks has been mainly to understand what caused that problem,” said Horner.

“As with all these things, it’s never a single thing, but a combination . . .

“Having understood that, we will carry the lessons into this weekend.”

Like the street track in the Azerbaijan capital, the Red Bull Ring is a circuit where power is a key component in a car’s performance.

Australian Daniel Ricciardo’s eighth in 2014 is their best result.

Two weeks ago, in Baku, they finished with Ricciardo seventh and teammate Dutch teenager Max Verstappen eighth after both used two stops to overcome severe tyre wear.

Horner added: “There has obviously been an awful lot of analysis into why we had so many problems in the Baku race because we were so competitive in qualifying.

“We overcompensated the car from Friday to go for qualifying performance and, in generating the tyre temperature for qualifying, we found ourselves outside the envelope on the first two compounds on a hot track.

“We have a reasonable understanding of what happened, but obviously the expectation wasn’t that we would be in so much trouble.”

Though he expects improvement, he warned that the Red Bull Ring was unlikely to witness a decline in Mercedes’ power supremacy.

“For this weekend, again, the layout of the circuit is very powercentric,” he said, adding that a new track surface was expected to provide more grip, another factor that might assist Red Bull in their bid to catch the Mercedes men.

Mercedes’ German driver Nico Rosberg has won both races since the circuit returned to the calendar in 2014 and bids for a hat-trick. — AFP