Red Bull to have chassis and engine upgrades at Melbourne

2017 F1 season

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Daniel Ricciardo has confirmed Red Bull will have an upgraded chassis and power unit for the first race of the season.

“I think Melbourne we’re going to see a little bit from both sides, from the power unit and the car will have some more aero bits on it,” said Ricciardo after his final run in the car in pre-season testing.

Max [Verstappen] had a bit of a troubled day with reliability yesterday, my day was pretty clean from start to finish,” Ricciardo explained. “So it’s still a little bit hit-and-miss I guess but I feel like come race day we’re going to be in a better position.”

Ferrari set the quickest time of testing so far today prompting speculation they may be able to challenge Mercedes when the season begins. But Riccairdo believes Red Bull will be able to match their performance.

“We certainly haven’t shown Ferrari’s pace yet,” he admitted. “So if you were to put some markers down and say Ferrari’s at the moment their closest challenger, I think that’s fair.”

“I think we’ve got it somewhere but we still need to find it.”

“It felt like we didn’t probably go that extra step forward,” Ricciardo said of his running today. “The progress was good and then today we got a little bit confused with set-up things.”

“Hopefully we have some answers tonight. Thankfully Max is in the car tomorrow, I think we need one more day to really understand the car better and then that’s it until Melbourne. In a way I’m happy the test is over because I’d just like to race.”

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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7 comments on “Red Bull to have chassis and engine upgrades at Melbourne”

  1. Peppermint-Lemon (@)
    9th March 2017, 18:13

    Good keep the updates coming we want to see Merc beaten this year.

    My dream top three for this year:

    1. Vettel
    2. Ricciardo
    3. Bottas

    1. I’d be happy with that.

  2. Let’s hope for the sake of racing that we can get a repeat of 2010-2013 with 3 teams in the hunt for wins. But that would require an improvement from Red Bull and Renault.

    1. Indeed. On the positive side, both RedBull and Renault will have the resources to turn things around during the course of the season, so even if they end-up with a chaotic start, history showed us they can start being competitive come the European season. Meaning we could end up having those 6 cars challenging for wins, which would be awesome.

  3. Andrew Purkis
    9th March 2017, 20:11

    looks like RBR and renault are underperforming

    Ferrari v merc

    1. That was always expected if you followed their comments since the end of the season. They said they’d pull down the performance a little bit, focus on the reliability with the new concept, then ramp up the performance throughout the season if it’s reliable. I think (don’t quote me on that) they said around half way in the season, if all goes well, we’ll see the true performance of this new engine.

      1. It’s sort of the strategy that Intel used in its processor development (tick/tock)

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