The Red Bull team has been presented imitating a rocket in Canada. Max Verstappen led the timesheets in both free practice sessions on Friday, so it would seem fair to say that the RB18 is showing clear superiority.
However, the gap to Charles Leclerc in FP2 was just 81 thousandths, in part because the Monegasque used a single set of soft tires to look for results as the track rubberized.
It is legitimate to wonder, then, if Carlos Sainz will be able to go on the attack in search of his first pole position, and prevent his Monegasque teammate’s streak on pole from continuing, but those from Milton Keynes are well aware that the points are shared Sunday and not after qualifying.
The delantera de carbono basket totally sold by the RB18
On the contrary, Adrian Newey ‘s engineers know that they have a fast and competitive car on their hands, but they are not at all sure that they have achieved the necessary reliability.
Leclerc’s retirements while leading in Spain and Azerbaijan made the task much easier for Verstappen and Pérez, who found themselves in an easy position to manage the lead without pushing the material to the limit, masking any weaknesses in the RB18.
Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing RB18
The Red Bull is an F1 car “under construction” and constantly evolving: despite the budget cap, there is no race in which details or important parts of the package are not modified, working on three fundamental lines : reliability, weight reduction and benefit investigation.
If we judge based on the results (five wins in a row), the first point should not worry and, instead, the squad led by Pierre Waché is dedicating time and resources to the theory so supported by so many that what matters is finishing the careers.
The watchful eye of our teammate, Giorgio Piola, has managed to capture a solution that Red Bull would have preferred to keep hidden: the Milton Keynes team has decided to invest in the braking system to try to solve the problems of overheating in the corners.
Having completed the change from metal disc covers to lighter carbon ones, which are filled with insulating material, they wanted to debut the new Brembo calipers at a track like Montreal, which is very picky about brakes.
The pliers in the traditional aluminum color, without the new anti-caloric treatment
The solution that they have brought to Canada is easily recognizable, since the color of the caliper, which is no longer the classic aluminum-lithium color that we know, is now much darker.
The mouths of all the members of the team are locked, but the logical idea is that a new thermal treatment has been experimented with, which favors the dispersion of heat inside the basket, which is closed.
Detail of the new brake caliper: the brake caliper is dark for a new treatment
Red Bull wants to grow in an aspect in which the F1-75 has seemed superior since the start of the season: in braking, on which Charles Leclerc has built some of his outstanding laps in qualifying, as if from the foundations of a house was involved.
In Milton Keynes, they are making sure to give an answer to these details of the Monegasque driver, to turn a weakness due to frequent overheating into a performance reason…
