Milton Keynes Snipe hunts

[NJB13]

Ever since 2010 testing there has been a seemingly endless stream of solutions as to why the Red Bulls are so fast.

The exhaust decals hiding the real exhausts, engine mapping, bendy t-trays, flexing front wings, adjustable ride-heights.... need I go on?

I think Horner Newey and co have developed this to a fine art and seem to be successfully sending everyone off on whatever their current wild-goose-chase is. In Melb it was the R-less KERS.

Perhaps in Sepang we might get snippets of "secret tools" like left handed hammers or striped paint.

Whatever the secret to their success, it's probably sitting right there in front of us (like that bendy nose) but they have us running down enough dead ends at the same time to ensure we just can't find the real needle in their haystack.

For me, the real secret to their success is they have been innovative, perhaps we need to focus more on that.

[REDARMYSOJA]

In Melb it was the R-less KERS.

.

I wonder if that actually showed a weakness for them. They ran with KERS on Friday. I also remember Vettel having a broken front wing on Friday, the reporters were saying how Newey was down on his back looking underneath the front wing. Makes me wonder if their flexi front wing can handle the extra boost of KERS, and that's why they took the KERS off.

[gvsnraju85]

I completely agree with you Mr. Spanky. There was a time when Ferrari used to get new stuff on board and other would scramble to play copy cat and catch up...now its the opposite. We keep talking about reliability, race pace and how our cars are soft on tyres. Sure reliability is important......but at what cost?? We have seen less and less innovation from our camp....we stick to proven thing instead of exploiting un chartered terrain.....like the rear suspension of ours.

We always concentrate on race pace and see how our Quali's are going for the past 2 years. We are soft on tyres yet we had to do 3 pit stops while our customers could do a 1 stop and race winners did a 2 stop and in the last Barcelona test we did a 4 stop with Alonso. Even our race pace was just about normal.....not blistering.


The biggest question in my mind is ...They say they could not get the tyres into the operating window. the temperatures in Melb on Sat was around 18C.
We had pretty much similar and some times even lower temperatures during our winter testing. So why did we not manage to cope with lower temperatures in Melb??

[NJB13]

I wonder if that actually showed a weakness for them. They ran with KERS on Friday. I also remember Vettel having a broken front wing on Friday, the reporters were saying how Newey was down on his back looking underneath the front wing. Makes me wonder if their flexi front wing can handle the extra boost of KERS, and that's why they took the KERS off.

I completely agree with you, the whole KES/KERS thing was a weakness, but, especially in the beginning the media and pitlane seemed hell bent on seeing this as some new/secret/brilliant innovation. I guess that's somewhat the point of my topic, that everyone sees everything RB does or says as something brilliant that needs to be followed, rather than doing their own innovation we are hell-bent on copying - everything.

Actually, I heard Adrian Newey "accidentally" dropped 11 copies of next weeks Milton Keynes shopping list. The teams are now busily trying to buy the following items from the list:-
Left handed hammers
striped paint
A bottle of K9P
Metric adjustable wrenches
Muffler bearings
A long weight