Red Bull Chief Engineer Paul Monaghan said the team sees little risk in introducing a floor upgrade to the Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix Sprint weekend.
The Milton Keynes-based F1 outfit has modified the floor fence and floor edges on the Red Bull RB21 to improve overall stability and load.
The Miami International Autodrome, as has become custom, hosts a Sprint, meaning Red Bull has only one practice session to bed in the floor alterations, but Monaghan doesn’t see that being an issue.
Moreover, the alterations should aid Red Bull in its attempts to improve through corner balance.
“That’s why we brought it,” he told select media, including Motorsport Week on Friday.
“It’s reasonably stable. We can bring it at relatively low risk because it’s a Sprint race. And it’s an opportunity to do it, we were able to do it.
“People work really hard in the factories, put it on the car and enjoy the benefits.”
The reason why Red Bull isn’t concerned about bringing the changes to a Sprint weekend is that the upgrades themselves aren’t seismic.
“The flow stability is unchanged,” Monaghan revealed.
“So we’re not fearing it to be aerodynamically unstable or anything of that nature.
“It can go on and it will give us a few kilos of load and we shall enjoy the benefits.”
Where will the upgrades help Red Bull at the Miami GP?
After a difficult Bahrain GP weekend, Red Bull worked hard to bring upgrades to Miami and Monaghan said, “the complaints we had, we’ve addressed some,” before adding, “Have we done it wholly? Probably not. Will we continue? Yes.
“It won’t be a sort of turnkey solution to unlock if you like, it’s going to be incremental improvements on the car,” Monaghan continued.
“We understand what’s happened but actually affecting a cure is not that straightforward. It may never disappear from the car.
“Can we reduce the magnitude, improve the lap time? Yes. There’s a lot of clever people in Milton Keynes who are working hard to improve step and it will come.”
Monaghan added that the upgrades, if optimised, should add speed through all corner variations for Red Bull.
“It will get us at the majority of them,” he said.
“Anytime you have a change of speed from the point you hit the brake to turn into the apex, everybody’s going to get it.
“Then it’s just the magnitude we argue over. It will come as incremental improvements and we’ll chip away. We’ll get quicker, don’t worry.”
READ MORE – Helmut Marko points out worrying Red Bull ‘weakness’ ahead of F1 Miami GP
Discussion about this post