Red Bull chief engineer Paul Monaghan believes that his team can still catch Mercedes and Ferrari in 2017, despite the team facing performance shortfalls in “several areas.”
Tipped by many as championship challengers during pre-season, Red Bull’s 2017 campaign has been one of disappointment so far. The team find themselves 89 points adrift of Mercedes at the top of the constructors’ standings after five races.
Monaghan, however, is convinced that Red Bull can reverse their fortunes and return to pre-eminence this year.
Asked in Thursday’s team personnel press conference whether his team could join the Mercedes and Ferrari duel, he stated; “There’s belief, yes, and a strong desire as well. I think if we lost belief it would be a fairly early end to our season.
“There’s a real determination to get more out of this car and close on the others – because they’re not standing still and as such our development rate has to exceed those guys. I think it can.
“It’s fair to say that we’ve not extracted as much as we can in terms of points-scoring from the first five and there’s a little bit of performance coming to each race.
“We set out on a pathway to catch them, let’s see if we can.”
Despite a highly anticipated update being brought to the RB13 at the Spanish Grand Prix, Red Bull was once again the third fastest team, with Daniel Ricciardo finishing 75 seconds behind race winner Lewis Hamilton.
This serves as evidence of the scale of the task ahead of the team and as Monaghan admitted, Red Bull’s engineering department has several issues to solve in order to reach their goal.
“I wouldn’t want to say that it’s one area, [in which we are weaker.]
“It’s going to be several areas and it’s up to us to identify the ones that have the greatest returns that we can alter, capitalise upon those and get the most out of our car.
“It’s only what lies within our control. We can’t do anything about what the others do. We will identify the shortfalls – I don’t think it’s going to be singular – it will be a plural, and we will chip away at them as we have been for some time now.”
