Red Bull wins testing ‘world championship’
Red Bull has come away as the effective winner of testing. Chiefly that’s the work of Max Verstappen. The reigning champion guided his RB18, shod with the fastest C5 tyres, to an unrivalled 1m31.720s effort with a little under 10 minutes to go on the final day in Bahrain.
Behind what’s thought to be a low-fuel run for second-fastest Mick Schumacher in the Haas, a seven-tenth advantage over Charles Leclerc could be, in part, explained by the Ferrari running the harder C4 Pirellis. You could also suppose that the Red Bull was light on fuel and had its Honda engine turned up to the max to grab the late headlines with a glory run. But the view from behind the barriers backs up the potency of the Milton Keynes creation.
It is not hyperbole with the gift of hindsight to say that the Red Bull had a habit of tricking the eye. On several occasions, it looked as though Verstappen was set to spin – not actually including when he did lose the car exiting the final corner in the build-up to his late flying laps. Even though this breed of machinery has jumped in weight, the RB18 appeared to be so responsive to the driver’s inputs. It was lithe and showed almost no propensity for washing wide. But it was the rear axle creating the deception. The back end of the car turns so violently that it looks as though it’s ready to swap ends and overtake the front. It never does, of course, but epitomises a car that possesses an unrivalled ‘wow factor’ at this stage of development.
Red Bull seems to have knocked its porpoising problems on the head too. Despite the shift to ground-effect dictating that a car runs as close and flat to the ground as possible, the team appears to have reverted to a previous-gen habit by introducing a touch of rake. That stops the stalling that is blighting its rivals, but doesn’t seem to have come at a cost to downforce.