© Getty ImagesHome from HomeDevastating DRS performance, a debut winner and a dominant performer. Red Bull’s Spanish Grand Prix victories have all been very different.
Whileeveryteamhasahomerace–andsomeofushavemorethanone–everyoneinthepaddocktendstoregardingtheCircuitdeBarcelona-CatalunyaasF1’shomevenue.It’sbeenever-presentonthecalendarsince1991andhasbeenthetesttrackofchoice,bothduringtheyearswhentestingwasunlimitedandalsointhesemoreproscribedtimes(butnot,interestingly,thisyear).
It’s superficially popular as a test venue because of proximity of motorways and airports, the likelihood of good weather, and the spaciousness of the garages – but there’s more to it than that. The real attraction of the track in the hills above Montmeló is that it has everything an F1 team wants: a long straight; low, medium and high-speed corners, extreme cambers, rapid changes of direction. It is tough on the brakes and famously vicious on tyres. A car that goes well here generally goes well everywhere, which is possibly why we’ve completed a mighty 75,952 testing kilometres at this circuit.
Above anything else, however, it’s a circuit built for racing – and with the Spanish Grand Prix usually coming at the beginning of the European season, perhaps after a sequence of atypical tracks, it’s often viewed as bellwether for championship aspirations. We’ve had some exciting times at the Spanish Grand Prix – but often the primary cause of that excitement is the promise of things to come.
The start of the 2010 season was curiously frustrating for the Team. The RB5 had finished the 2009 season extremely strongly, and the RB6 seemed to have picked up where that left off – and by the time the Championship got to Spain for Round Five, it had taken all four pole positions… but only one victory, for Seb in Malaysia.
Elsewhere a mixture of technical gremlins and bad luck had seen wins slip away. In Spain, however, everything aligned. Seb and Mark were almost a second ahead of the competition in Qualifying, with Mark on pole. The Australian went on to lead every lap of the race. “Everything went my way today,” said a jubilant Mark afterwards. “With the other victories there has been a bit more going on as I wasn't always in the lead, but today was all about watching the lap board go down and my god, it just takes forever!
2011:RedBullDoesn’tNeedWing
There are other contenders but the RB7 might just be the best car we’ve ever built. It took 18 poles during the 19-race 2011 season and a dozen victories, including three of the first four races – but it was at the Spanish Grand Prix, Race Five, that quite how good a car it was became apparent. The well-meaning but slightly controversial Drag Reduction System has been introduced for 2011, allowing cars a speed boost by stalling the rear wing and reducing drag on the straights.
In the race, as today, it was only active when following within a second of another car on a specified straight – but in practice and qualifying the cars could use it as they wished. Mark Webber set tongues wagging by running through the fearsome, high-speed final corner with the DRS flap open: the RB7 clearly had downforce to spare.
Mark duly took his second Spanish Grand Prix pole position, but got swamped at the start and spent much of the race tucked up under Fernando Alonso’s rear wing, eventually finishing fourth – one of only five times the pole position driver at the Circuit de Catalunya has finished the race and not won. That left the way clear for Seb – but he didn’t have it easy. Running a four-stop strategy (the surface in Barcelona used to be even more abrasive than it is today, and this was a hot day) he was chased all the way by Lewis Hamilton and crossed the line just 0.6s ahead.
Everything Max does makes news – but rarely with quite so much as the thunderbolt impact as his arrival at Red Bull Racing. He contested the first four races of 2016 with Toro Rosso before the decision was taken to promote him with immediate effect, with Daniil Kvyat going the other way. Going to Spain, that raised a lot of questions from the fans – and quite a few, it has to be said, in the garage also – but senior management were adamant Max was a generational talent that could not be held back. They didn’t have to wait long to be proved correct, with Max winning his first race with the team, and in the process becoming F1’s youngest winner, 18 years and 228 days old.
Max needed a bit of luck. The two Mercedes took each other out on the first lap, and, faced with the usual Barcelona pit-stop dilemma and with a rare victory there for the taking, the strategists decided to maximise our chances by putting Daniel and Max on different strategies. Daniel’s was arguably the prime but the way the race broke, it was Max who came out in front, to hold off a charging Kimi Räikkönen in the last quarter of the race and stand on the top step. In the aftermath, Max admitted that, with so little sim time before the race, he didn’t know what all the buttons on the steering wheel did and wasn’t close to getting the maximum out of the car – but he knew enough to get the job done.
During their tenure as team-mates, Max and Checo have shared eight 1-2 finishes and, as always when a team locks out first and second position, there’s an underlying assumption that it’s been a dominant weekend. Last year’s Spanish Grand Prix wasn’t like that at all. The car hadn’t set the timesheets ablaze during practice; qualifying second (Max) and fifth (Checo) wasn’t particularly surprising. The race itself was likewise tricky. Max went off in the early stages in the difficult cross-breeze at Turn Four (neither the first nor the last to be caught-out by that) and was struggling with a DRS problem that hampered his overtaking potential.
The Circuit de Catalunya, however, provides plenty of opportunities for strategy to play its part. While recent resurfacing has made the track much less abrasive that the famously aggressive tarmac of old, the amount of energy pouring into the tyres through the many fast corners still makes the race a multiple-stop event. Once Charles Leclerc had retired with a mechanical, Max and Checo were both in the hunt. The team put Max on a Soft-Medium-Soft-Medium strategy and Checo on a Soft-Medium-Medium-Soft plan, which required the Mexican to let his team-mate through. In the end, the two drivers finished well clear of the chasing pack, and Checo bagged the extra point for fastest lap. It was a perfect score in Spain – but far from a perfect weekend.
