MOTORSPORT: Pros and cons for Ricciardo

While Daniel Ricciardo is relaxing after his hellish Australian Grand Prix, conflicting signals are coming from Red Bull Racing (RBR) on how competitive his car can be this season – and how soon.

RBR team principal Christian Horner says “there’s really good development potential in the concept we have” with the RB13.

However, Helmut Marko (a straighter talker than Horner and representative of Red Bull energy drink tycoon, Dietrich Mateschitz) says the team won’t get a major upgrade of its Renault power unit until the Canadian GP on the second weekend of June.

carsales.com.au global ambassador Ricciardo’s performance in Melbourne last weekend (a crash in qualifying, missing the start with a gearbox problem and only going half the race distance before retiring with lack of fuel pressure after starting from the pits two laps late) gave little clue to what he can achieve this season with the RB13.

Teammate Max Verstappen efforts were more indicative of where Red Bull is at in comparison with Ferrari and Mercedes.

Verstappen qualified almost 1.3sec slower than the pole position time of Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton and on average was 0.7sec slower per lap than Ferrari’s victorious Sebastian Vettel and Hamilton in the race. Verstappen finished almost half a minute behind Vettel in fifth place.

Ricciardo, whose is having time off in WA before the Chinese GP in Shanghai on April 7-9, is optimistic about the remaining 19 rounds of the world championship.

“I think the car is better than we’re showing, but it is a bit of a puzzle we are trying to work out,” he said.

“I hope we can find the pace soon enough – let’s go to China!”

Horner says there is good reason to believe that Red Bull can make the championship a three-way fight with Mercedes (the dominant team in the era of 1.6-litre V6 hybrid power units) and the revived Ferrari. However, he admits there a lot of work needed on both the RB13 chassis and its Renault unit.

“We need a good half a second [a lap] to get into that fight with the cars ahead,” Horner said.

While he is much more diplomatic about Renault than at the depths of the strained relations in 2015, RBR believes its power unit (badged TAG-Heuer under a sponsorship deal) is costing it at least 0.5sec a lap on the Ferrari SF70H and Mercedes W08.

For now the RB13 has last year’s heavier MGU-K (the motor generator unit that recovers kinetic energy from the rear axle) as the 5-6kg lighter version designed for this year overheated in pre-season testing.

The extra weight is said to add about 0.2sec to lap times, and it will be at least the fourth round of the championship in Sochi, Russia, at the end of April before the new version is introduced.

While RBR is assured of improvements from Renault for the Spanish GP in Barcelona on the second weekend of May, it will be another month before the “significant” upgrade from the French company that the team expects to be worth 0.3-0.4sec a lap.

RBR also is counting on aerodynamic refinements from its technical chief Adrian Newey to narrow the gap.

“From our side there is a lot to do, and Renault’s side as well,” Marko said.

Horner is more upbeat. He said there were “a lot of positives” to be taken from Melbourne, a circuit at which RBR has not been competitive in the hybrid era – other than the first year, 2014, when Ricciardo finished second but was disqualified over a fuel-flow infringement.

“We have a good basis and a good direction and, as the [2017] regulations are quite immature, I think things will move quite quickly,” Horner said.

“I honestly believe we will get ourselves into a competitive situation this year.”

Meanwhile, Mercedes is desperately trying to save weight, promising an “immediate response” to Ferrari’s success in a report in Germany’s Auto Motor Und Sport that claimed its W09 was 5kg over the minimum 728kg in Melbourne.

“I don’t want to go too much into detail, but it’s an area we can definitely improve,” Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff said.

“With the new regulations and the size of the cars, you need to balance out all the time between performance and the weight. That’s an ongoing exercise...” Wolff stated.

Fiat and Ferrari chief Sergio Marchionne has said that the group’s racing operation “needs” some kind of participation in Formula E, now in its third season – with the fourth round of its championship on a street circuit in Mexico City this weekend.

Formula E recently announced nine manufacturers for its fifth season in 2018-19, without Ferrari or Mercedes among them.

But Marchionne has told the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) publication, Auto: “We need to be involved in Formula E because electrification via hybridisation is going to be part of our future.

“Hybridisation is crucial to Ferrari. We have already developed a hybrid supercar, La Ferrari, and on future Ferrari models we will leverage new technologies as well as electrification,” he said.

Marchionne had previously said Ferrari would not be interested in Formula E until its technical regulations were relaxed to allow manufacturers greater freedom to develop the cars.

He was also critical of drivers having to swap into a second car mid-race because of the short battery life.

From 2018-19, the series will use new batteries developed by McLaren Applied Technologies intended to eliminate the need to change cars mid-race.
Power gives thumbs up to IndyCar’s 2018 look
IndyCar this week released computer-generated images of a standard aero kit it intends to introduce next year to make its cars look sleeker and faster – and Australia’s 2014 IndyCar champion Will Power gave it a tick of approval.

In particular, the boxy rear-wheel guards of recent years (nicknamed Kardashians) will be removed from the Chevrolet and Honda-powered Dallara DW12s. However, the images do not contain any ‘halo’ or aeroscreen cockpit protection mooted since the deaths of Justin Wilson in IndyCar and Jules Bianchi in F1.

Power told US publication Autoweek though: “I think the [Indy] car looks good with the low engine cover and the cool rear wing. It’s a definite improvement. I think it should make it a much better car to race.

“They wanted to make the racing better, make the car look better and get rid of some of that heavy stuff hanging off the back bumpers. This puts it back to more of an open-wheel type of car, and it reduces rear weight. That is a big help.

“I’m glad they are moving the radiators forward and getting rid of some of the weight in the rear. That was a real problem,” Power stated.

There will be two variations of the kits – one for road and street courses and short ovals, the other for the superspeedways like Indianapolis.

Power said he favoured keeping the rear bumper guard for superspeedways, where holes will still be drilled into the floor of the cars to create more drag if they lift off.

“The bumper guard… in a lot of cases stop cars from jumping over the back wheels. It’s not going to stop a car when there is a huge speed discrepancy. What else it did was stop cut tyres.

"The original rear bumper was the right size and then they got out of control with this big one,” he said.
World Rallycross Championship on the Net
The fourth World Rallycross Championship kicks off in Barcelona this weekend and, in what might be a sign of things to come for motorsport, the series will be broadcast in Britain exclusively by Motorsport.tv.

The internet TV platform is part of American-owned Motorsport Network, the owner of Motorsport.com and now Autosport.com.

Last year’s World RX had seven winners, with Swede Mattias Ekstrom the champion in an Audi S1.

Norwegian Petter Solberg, champion the first two seasons, has switched from a Citroen to a VW Polo this year.

The field also includes rallying’s most successful driver, Frenchman Sebastien Loeb, in a Peugeot, American Ken Block in a Ford Focus, and Brit Guy Wilks in a VW.

World RX is screened in Australia on Fox Sports.