F1 News
Honda explains Red Bull performance: 'That was our weakness'
- GPblog.com
Red Bull Racing can be satisfied with the season so far. Whereas Mercedes have been dominant in recent years with Lewis Hamilton, the Austrian racing team is proving to be competitive this season. In fact Max Verstappen is still top of the world championship standings.
The team of Verstappen and Sergio Pérez expressed several times in recent years that it was ready to fight Mercedes, but each time Red Bull failed to actually try to compete for the world title. This season, however, has been going a lot better and at times Hamilton could do nothing but allow Verstappen to grab a Grand Prix victory.
A large part of the performance has to do with Honda's engine which is proving to be very reliable for now. "We cannot make everything they request, but the integration of chassis and power-unit made a good improvement," states Toyoharu Tanabe in conversation with The BBC. "Also on the Honda side we made a good improvement in terms of performance - we improved both on the internal combustion engine and the electric performance."
Performance of Red Bull
As a result, Tanabe sees the car performing a lot better than in recent years. "In the previous years always you saw Honda lose speed at the end of the straight. This is a deficit for the lap time and also for the overtake situation. That was our weakness in the PU, so we tried to make this one much closer to the other competitors."