The Racing Bulls are currently on a negative run. Until a few weeks ago, it looked as if the small Red Bull team could slowly creep up on Aston Martin. But after the latest updates didn’t work as planned, things seemed to be going in the opposite direction – with an almost shocking Formula 1 weekend in Spain.
Since then, the team from Faenza has tried to solve its problems with setup experiments. This seems to have had an effect for the first time at the F1 qualifying in Spielberg. After the sprint qualifying on Friday and the sprint went wrong, the RBs are suddenly fighting for a place in Q3 in the real time hunt.
Yuki Tsunoda self-critical after Q2 exit: My mistake!
On a positive note, however, he noted that the development direction this weekend was going steeply upwards: “I think my car was good. We definitely took the best from the previous sessions. The team did a good job in that regard.” With his fastest lap in Q2, Tsunoda only managed 14th place on the grid.
This meant a relatively rare defeat in the qualifying duel against Daniel Ricciardo. The Australian managed to finish in P11 and missed out on Q3 by just 0.015 seconds. Unlike Tsunoda, he felt he had exploited the full potential of his Formula 1 car.
“My lap was pretty good. I was able to improve by a tenth or half a tenth on every lap. That’s why I feel like we got to a point where there wasn’t much left to gain,” he explained the development of his qualifying Saturday. The narrow exit was still frustrating, but a “positive kind of frustration.”
“The fact that we are disappointed that we didn’t make it into Q3 by a tiny bit shows how much progress we have made since yesterday,” explained Ricciardo. So there is hope in the Racing Bull camp that points are possible for the race. But there is no reliable data on what the race pace will be due to the sprint weekend. So it will only be during the Formula 1 race at the Austrian GP that we will see what the Racing Bull is capable of.