The chief engineer also highlighted that his team has the necessary set-up tools for Sergio Pérez to feel more comfortable with the car.
In his statements this Thursday at the Austrian GP , Pérez suggested that in recent races the RB18 has not adapted to him as much as at the beginning of the season.
This is how the Mexican spoke: “I have not felt as comfortable with him as at the beginning. Let’s put it that way. So I think I have to work to understand what is happening.”
Monaghan insisted the team had not sought to make the car better suited to Perez’s teammate Max Verstappen, stressing that any recent changes to the car were a result of the normal performance development process.
“We are not aware that we have taken a deliberate step to make the car less to his liking,” he said.
“It’s not easy to make cars go faster, shall we say. And within a fairly restricted set of technical regulations and freedoms, if you find a way to add a little bit of pace, you’ll adopt it if it’s within your financial constraints.”
“So then you go through a process with your research tools, full-size realization and then full-size evaluation. our tools say the car will be faster.
“Now, it may be that by deploying those tools, it has been easier for Max to adopt them. Perhaps his set-up has adapted a bit more than Checo’s. But it’s not that the car is fixed in terms of its parameters, and that Checo cannot later review the set-up to say that he is comfortable again”.
“And it would be foolish of us not to try to give Checo a method to get more out of it. We are in a battle for the two titles. And we need the two cars ahead of the Ferraris and the Mercedes, so we will do everything possible. for both of them to be there.”
Monaghan said there are ways to make Perez more comfortable in the car.
“Have we followed a preferred direction for Max?” he pointed out. “No, not really. It’s pretty hard to add rhythm. And if we find a way to do it, we’ll do it.”
“And then within the toolkit of a race engineer, and the things that we can change, of course, we’ll look to review the set-up, everybody would.
“It should be within our power to find something that is perhaps a little more to their liking. And the balance between the drivers throughout the season always flows.”
“If you look, Checo has outdone Max this year at times, hasn’t he? Something that hasn’t happened in a while with any of Max’s teammates. So there are ups and downs.”
Monaghan said that Red Bull always wants both cars to be competitive.
“Max is not one to rest on his laurels, neither is Checo and neither are we. So our career is within our own team.”
“But they have to remember that they both drive for the same team, and then our race is against our rivals, who will be quite happy to see us behind them.”
“So our fight is on many fronts. But one of them, the intern in our team, I wouldn’t consider it a competition, it’s more our challenge. And it’s our two drivers, so we’ll support them as best we can.”
