After a very impressive first season at the main Red Bull team Daniel Ricciardo is feeling the bump former team-mate Sebastian Vettel hit last year.
The Australian could seemingly do no wrong as he finished ‘best of the rest’ in the world championship behind the two Mercedes and was the only man not named Lewis Hamilton or Nico Rosberg to take the chequered flag first in 2014.
This season so far, however, as fallen a long way short of expectations as Red Bull and Renault struggle to find the performance to challenge the leading Mercedes and the vastly improved Ferrari. Indeed the former quadruple world champions have seemingly taken the Scuderia’s place as a team that should be fighting for podiums but instead has become mired in the close midfield pack.
Sixth place in Australia seemed a horrid result at the time but remains Ricciardo’s best result of 2015 at this point as brake issues in Malaysia and a very poor start in China resulted in the 25-year-old battling for the minor scoring places.
Now though the man from Perth is hoping a series of upgrades coming for the Spanish Grand Prix next month can provide what he called a “magic button” and reignite Red Bull’s 2015 season.
“We’ve got the people behind the team to hold the magic button and I hope that’s the one,” he told Autosport.
“I don’t want to get too caught up in it, because it’s easy to get disappointed, but the team has got the ability to make a big step like that.
He and the rest of the team are continuing to use the resurrection of Ferrari as motivation that Red Bull can also turn their current slump around but, as Ricciardo himself admits, pinning hopes on improvements coming for the start of the European season can be a risky move.
That is because Barcelona is the venue where nearly all the teams look to introduce their most comprehensive set of car developments since the opening race of the season.
While the bigger teams do have the ability to bring new parts to almost every race, the long-haul flights between Europe and Asia mean only relatively minor improvements are made, but, in the case of the Spanish Grand Prix, half a second or more can sometimes be found by some.
As a result, even a gain such as that by Red Bull likely won’t be enough to jump them from their current battle with Sauber, Lotus and sister team Toro Rosso to the likes of Ferrari and certainly Mercedes.
Instead Williams should be considered the first viable target for Christian Horner’s squad but to do that much will depend on Renault making strides with its underpowered V6 turbo hybrid because, as the wet qualifying in Malaysia showed, there is enough underlying pace in the RB11 to challenge the Grove based team.
The problem for the French engine supplier, however, is ensuring reliability with the current specification engine. Daniil Kvyat and Max Verstappen with both forced out of the race in Shanghai with power unit failures while Ricciardo himself had to switch to a third internal combustion engine between qualifying and the race leaving him with just one fresh V6 of his allocation of four for the remainder of the season.
Speaking after Sunday’s race, Renault’s F1 chief Cyril Abiteboul admitted he couldn’t rule out further problems in the sandy atmosphere of Bahrain with no time to fix the problems suffered in China.
“We knew it was a weakness so there was a plan in place. We need to make sure the plan is good enough for the size of the issues we had today, and whether it can be addressed fairly quickly,” he also told Autosport.
“I’m not quite sure from a logistical perspective that it could be addressed for Bahrain, but certainly our aim has been to have absolutely no reliability issues by Monaco.
“We knew that the first engine we built had some reliability weaknesses.
“The plan is to make sure that the future engine we will be building has absolutely no reliability issues.”
Certainly that final point will be something Ricciardo and the rest of the Red Bull and Toro Rosso team’s will be hoping becomes a reality but it would only really be a first step in a long road back to where they were. It has been a major fall from grace for the team who were dominating F1 just 18 months ago.
Images Courtesy of Red Bull Content Pool
