RED BULL TRIES MONACO WING IN SPAIN?
The Spanish Grand Prix was not the first time Max Verstappen has complained about being a sitting duck, but this time Red Bull was completely undone by Lewis Hamilton’s unexpected second stop to break the deadlock for the lead. On the face of it, Red Bull didn’t appear to be wholly in the mix at all after Friday practice, after both drivers were in the lower reaches of the top 10 by the end of FP2, and Hamilton pointed at a rear-wing change being behind Red Bull’s sudden upturn on Saturday.
Rather than run with the usual configuration featuring the upturned outer portions of the wing, Red Bull used a more conventional rear-wing assembly on Friday, which was larger to generate more downforce at the expense of drag. This gave away, Hamilton reckoned, about 0.3 seconds to the Mercedes pair, but it seems to have been more of a glimpse of what to expect at Monaco than a potential wing format for Barcelona. The final sector of the Spanish venue is often employed as a bellwether to assess a car’s low-speed performance, and so it’s reasonable to assume that Red Bull could have taken an extended look at the wing in preparation for F1’s upcoming visit to the Principality.