Mercedes and Red Bull with updates in Austria
Despite dominating the pre-season testing at Barcelona, both Mercedes and Red Bull will bring updates to their cars for the season-opening Austrian Grand Prix.
Although teams had to observe a 63-day shutdown period in the months of March, April and May, in the lead time to the disrupted Australian Grand Prix and during their preparation for the Austrian Grand Prix, they were able to work on their cars.
While Haas indicated that it won’t introduce updates until the final 2020 F1 calendar is finalized, top teams have the necessary resources at their disposal to push on with the car development before major parts of their current machines fall under homologation.
Mercedes and Red Bull have confirmed that they will debut significant updates at the Austrian Grand Prix where the 2020 F1 season finally gets underway. While Ferrari is believed to bring key updates to its 2020 machine after its low-keyed pre-season form, the Scuderia has not confirmed the introduction of updates yet.
The energy drink-owned team had originally planned updates for three races of the calendar including the grands prix in the Netherlands, Spain and Canada, said Red Bull Team Principal Christian Horner. The team will introduce those updates as an extensive package at this weekend’s Spielberg race.
„We don’t really know where we stand going into Austria and of course the car would have been developed. There would have been updates at the first European races at Zandvoort and Barcelona, there would have been further updates for Montreal, so of course all the updates that were in the pipeline prior to the shutdown.”
„Plus whatever we’ve learned subsequent to the shutdown, have been implemented to the car so there are subtle revisions all over the car as part of that update process which I’m sure the other front running teams have also done,” he said.
Red Bull is looking forward to the second year of its partnership with Honda after a succesful first year. Horner has revealed that the Japanese engine-manufacturer will give debut its spec-2 power unit in the team’s home grand prix.
„We also have an engine upgrade as we essentially introduce what would have been engine number two, which becomes our first engine, so in all aspects of the car there has been an awful lot of work go into and it’s been a race against the clock to get those updates onto the car since reopening the factory at the beginning of June.”
Not only Red Bull will introduce updates to its initial car in the season-opening Austrian Grand Prix. After establishing itself as the field-leading team once again during the pre-season testing, Mercedes is also bringing a raft of new parts to Spielberg.
The Brackley-based team’s Technical Director James Allison indicated earlier that his outfit will also introduce significant upgrades. According to the Briton, the basic car that Mercedes brought to Australia had been finalized at the end of December.
“So we got quite a lot of ideas as to how to make it quicker, and quite a lot of ideas were already in train, in process through the design office before we were forced to shut down nine weeks ago.
“So our challenge now is to make sure that that quarter of a year of development can get off the drawing boards and onto the car as swiftly as possible. We hope to have a chunk of that for the first race in Austria, and the season that follows will of course take as much of the development as fast as we can get it onto the car in turn,” Allison added.
