© Getty ImagesBack to where it all began…We made our debut in Albert Park and have enjoyed – or endured – many memorable moments since.
Melbourneisatoughplacetogoracing.Wesaythatabouteverycircuit,andit’strue…butit’smoretrueinAlbertPark.Thatisn’tabadthing,becausetoughracetracksmakethingshappen.Andwhileit’stough,AlbertParkisalsoagreatplacetogoracing.It’sfast,it’sunpredictableandthere’samassivecrowdtocheeryouon(orgiveyousomegood-naturedsledging)asyouwalkintoworkinthemorning.
Part of the thing that makes it so tough is that it’s always an early season race. Across the 11 years F1 raced in Adelaide, Australia always ended the season, but since moving to Melbourne in 1996, the Australian Grand Prix has always been at or near the start of the season. Teams aren’t really in the groove yet: they’re subject to all sorts of mechanical problems, strategic mistakes and human errors that go away as the season goes on.
Add to that the nature of the track itself. Albert Park (or the Melbourne Grand Prix Circuit, as precisely no-one calls it) is a mixture of city streets and park access roads and, like all non-permanent tracks, it’s very, very dirty at the start of the weekend. That’s not a commentary on street cleaning standards in Victoria – simply that permanent circuits in regularly use tend to have asphalt designed for grip, and a racing line constantly being blasted clean by the passage of cars, that are always laying down a thick coating of rubber in the braking zones. City streets don’t have that: they tend to be very dusty and thus, very slippery. In racing parlance, they’re referred to as green circuits. The combination of slippery streets and unyielding walls makes Albert Park a tricky proposition – but it’s made more difficult by the pace at which the track cleans up.
One of the truly great things about the Australian Grand Prix is that it has absolutely magnificent programme of races. Across four days, from dawn ‘til dusk, there’s something blatting around on track. This year was better than ever, with Porsches, Supercars, Formula 3, Formula 2, Historics, various demonstrations and, of course F1. They’re all cleaning the racing line, all laying down rubber and thus lap-times drop rapidly. For race engineers, knowing what constitutes a genuine set-up improvement, and what is simply the result of track evolution is a difficult thing to judge: very much like hitting a moving target.
Taken together, it makes the Australian Grand Prix something of an outlier. On the one hand, not a race to present results you can trust… but on the other, a place always likely to spring a surprise. We’ve had many memorable races in Albert Park: here’s a few that stand out.
The Red Bull Racing livery has changed over the years – but it hasn’t changed much. The dark blue bodywork, yellow nose and airbox, red detailing is now a staple of the motorsport world wherever Red Bull compete, and in whatever category – but the 2005 Australian Grand Prix, held in Albert Park on the weekend of 4-6 March, was the first opportunity for most people to see the design that would become very familiar over the next two decades. It was our first Formula One race.
In The Beginning© Getty Images
…but before that, there was a team to introduce to the World. The F1 press had got their fill over winter testing, but for a more casual audience, it all started in Melbourne’s Docklands, with a press conference at Shed 14. There’s a painfully young Christian Horner, technical director Guenther Steiner (****ing Hell! Whatever happened to him?), and drivers Christian Klein, Tonio Luizzi and David Coulthard. The team were… brash, and treated with suspicion by both their peers and the press. Some of the ideas launched at the start of 2005 – the parties, the Energy Station etc. – caught on; others – rotating Klien and Luizzi between race driver and Friday practice driver roles – did not.
Melbourne, however, underlined the team’s credibility as a racing outfit first and a party outfit second. DC and Klien qualified fifth and sixth, and went on to finish fourth and seventh. Both cars in the points on debut… and then a massive party.
13 of our 19 seasons have begun in Melbourne (five in Bahrain, one in Austria), so we’ve become accustomed to drivers making their racing debut for the team in Albert Park. After Coulthard and Klien, we’ve had Mark Webber (2007), Sebastian Vettel (2009), Daniel Ricciardo (2014) and Dany Kvyat (2015) but most of the attention in Melbourne tends to be on the new cars. It’s still the case when the Aussie GP pops up second or third on the schedule, but the scrutiny if it’s the first race can be intense. Winter testing tends to be indicative… but no-one really knows where they are until the lights go out.
One of the nicest things about starting the season in Melbourne was the bounce a race team gets from stepping off the plane into blue skies and sunshine. It’s not always the case – March in Melbourne is a bit of a mixed-bag – but compared to the winter months we’re leaving behind, it’s a very nice change. It’s even appreciated by fans back home, yawning and huddled under duvets to watch the season opener in the middle of the night [because no, recording it to watch later is not the same], but a minor tweak to the scheduling in 2009 at least presented them with the opportunity for a little more sleep by shifting the race to a twilight start time. Not ‘twilight’ in the sense used for the floodlit Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, but twilight in the sense of taking place when the sun is heading for the horizon. Of course, what’s good for TV isn’t necessarily good for the teams. Getting into the start of Autumn, the sun is pretty low in the sky by the time the race and qualifying are underway, making a couple of corners virtually impossible to see.
After winning both titles in 2010, the start of the 2011 season had an unusual feel to it, with Red Bull and the RB7 the presumptive favourites for the title. Seb duly won from pole position – our only victory so far in Oz – but the manner in which it happened was perhaps more of a marker. F1 had dabbled with a hybrid system in 2009, with varying degrees of success (neither Brawn nor ourselves – first and second in the Constructors’ Championship – fitted one), but after a self-imposed ban in 2010, it returned in 2011, encompassing the whole grid… sort of. The TV graphics showed that neither Seb on his way to pole, nor Mark qualifying P3, used the Kinetic Energy Recovery System. When asked post-session why not, Seb said “not fully charged.” While not strictly untrue, it also wasn’t the full story: KERS wasn’t fitted to the Red Bulls in Melbourne, with the team preferring a lighter car to the extra power. That Seb still managed to take pole by eight-tenths of a second, before winning the race by 22 seconds, demonstrated the ominous potential of the RB7. It finished the season with 18 poles from 19 races and 12 wins. And those chassis are still going strong as the mainstay of our Live Demo fleet – one of which you’ll have seen Daniel driving around Australia recently. [LINK TO AUS ROAD TRIP]
One of the fun things about the early season races is that no-one’s really sure what the cars are capable of doing – fun, that is, for everyone but the strategists and tyre engineers who need to know this stuff. Sure, they’ve done race sims in winter testing – but it’s never really the same thing – and particularly not when those tests take place on a permanent circuit very different in grip and temperature to Albert Park. 2013 was a classic example of most people getting it wrong and one team getting it very right. The RB9 looked like a class act in practice but didn’t get to confirm that until Sunday morning. Torrential rain saw qualifying halted, and then delayed and finally postponed – which meant a very long race day for everyone. Our garage wasn’t too disgruntled as Seb and Mark locked-out the front row when Q2 and Q3 finally took place – and things looked rosy for the race. But Albert Park and Kimi Räikkönen had different ideas. While everything had pointed to a three-stop race, Kimi bucked that particular trend and went for two. Much to the surprise of the six cars and three teams that started in front of his Lotus, he made his tyres last the distance and won by a comfortable margin. It’s the sort of thing that wouldn’t happen later in the year when everyone knows their cars much better – but that’s what makes these opening rounds so exciting.
Guessing Game© Getty Images
It’s often difficult to spot when an era begins in F1 – but easy to spot when one ends. After four years of success, culminating in the nine-in-a-row finale to 2013 for Seb, ours came crashing down with the introduction of the new engine regs in 2014. Winter testing went… badly: the car was often on fire, and at one point the garage vacuum cleaner was cannibalised for makeshift ducting. It wasn’t the smoothest of starts but the RB10 resolutely did not suck when it got to Australia. In a wet quali session, Daniel managed to mark his Red Bull Racing debut with P2 on the grid, followed by P2 in the race… only to be disqualified hours later after a disagreement between the team and the stewards over acceptable methodologies for working with the new-fangled fuel flow sensors. But the team – with the possible exception of Sporting Director Jonathan Wheatley, who had to do the walk of shame, handing Daniel’s trophy over to McLaren – were reasonably happy. As Tony Burrows, support team manager summarised: "A matter of weeks before, we imagined that race would see us dicing with cars at the back, before catching fire and stopping. That turnaround was drastic, we went from a complete nightmare to a podium and we were reasonably on the pace." As for Daniel, he prefers the happy memory of standing on the podium at his home Grand Prix – though he likens the process of getting out onto the podium through a trapdoor to being akin to something from Being John Malkovich.
New Year New Regs© Getty Images
2015/2016:TheCurseofAlbertPark
Luck doesn’t really play much of a part in Formula One – at least not over the course of a season, when the good and bad tend to even themselves out. For individual races, however, well, Albert Park isn’t a good place for anyone from Red Bull Racing to be buying a lottery ticket. We’ve failed to score on 15 occasions, with crashes, a disqualification, and various mechanical problems, from a broken wheel for Vettel to Max’s fuel system woes last year – but no-one’s had quite so much bad luck in a Red bull as Dany Kvyat. Dany twice drove for us in Australia… but didn’t start either race. In 2015, he suffered a transmission failure on his out-lap, while in 2016 it was an electrical issue that left him unable to take his place on the grid, forcing the rest of the field to do an extra formation lap. Seeing the DNS classification is rare – but for a driver to have two in consecutive seasons at the same race… now that’s bad luck.
The Curse Of Albert Park© Getty Images
This year was our first Melbourne victory since 2011 – though whether everyone thinks the curse has been lifted it a matter of some debate. Certainly it wasn’t the easiest route to victory we’ll ever have. On paper, when the memory fades, it’ll all look good, with Max winning from pole position – but that wasn’t the story of the weekend at all. Checo started from the back after problems in Quali and had a good race to scrap his way up to fifth on a track notoriously tough for overtaking, bagging the point for fastest lap along the way – but all eyes were on Max. He lost the lead into Turn One and had to bide his time, while the early stages of the race were disrupted by two Safety Car periods and a red flag.
It was, however, the end of the race that really jangled the nerves. Having swept into the lead on lap 12, Max held the position until the closing stages when, on very old tyres, the Safety Car was deployed once again on lap 54 of the 58. It’s a tricky moment for anyone leading. Max’s comfortable 9s advantage was instantly eroded, and he faced the conundrum of knowing it was a situation from which he could only lose. Pit for fresh Soft rubber and face the possibility the race ends behind the Safety Car; don’t pit and know someone behind almost certainly will (yes, we’re aware of the irony).
Fortunately for Max, that conundrum didn’t last long, as the race was red-flagged. He then had to prepare for a fraught standing restart, knowing that, if he lost out as he had the first time, that would probably be a victory snatched from his grasp. The team in the garage let out a collective sigh of relief when he got into the braking point for T1 perfectly… swiftly replaced by a rush to grab grid trolleys as pandemonium ensued behind Max, bringing out another red flag. The race ended with a processional lap behind the Safety Car – but given how the day had been going, even that was a little bit tense.
The Red Flag Lottery© Getty Images
