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Max Verstappen says “it’s all looking promising” after his first taste of the new Red Bull RB16B at Silverstone yesterday, but stresses Mercedes remains the favourite ahead of the 2021 season.
The 23-year-old was unwilling to draw any conclusions on the car having split the 100km of running on a promotional day with new team-mate Sergio Perez, suggesting it would not be until next month’s three days of pre-season testing in Bahrain that he gets a clear indication of how big a step forward the car is.
Instead, he stressed the focus on the shakedown was ensuring the car worked as expected so Red Bull hits the ground running in testing.
“It’s all looking promising, but it doesn’t make sense now to hype everything up,” said Verstappen.
“First, it’s more important just to get the track in Bahrain and try to do the best amount of learning we can on the car and the engine to optimise everything.
He added: “That’s what we all want, to try and make it a bit more difficult for probably Mercedes. They must be the favourites still so let’s see how everything goes.”
Verstappen said it’s difficult to get a good feel for the car given it was running on Pirelli’s demo tyres, which are lower-grip and behave differently to the race-specification tyres.
He would not comment on his impressions of the balance of the car given the low grip and the fact the team has not had the opportunity to do any set-up work.
“The thing is, we drove on demo tyres so it will never feel how it’s going to feel on real tyres,” said Verstappen.
“I never really base a lot of my findings on this. It’s more just to get the car out and running a few laps.
“It all felt normal to me. So we just have to wait and see what’s happening in Bahrain, once we have proper tyres under the car.”
Asked about the advantage of largely carrying over a car that was strong enough to outqualify and outrace Mercedes in the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix last year, Verstappen suggested the car had built on that.
But he also warned that the aerodynamic rule changes cutting back the floor towards the rear of the car has had an impact.
“The floor is still a big change, to try and recover all the downforce losses is going to be important and again it’s going to be interesting to see who did that the best,” said Verstappen.
“At the moment I don’t know where we are. But there’s a few things of course we have to be on top of and Mercedes was still the dominant car towards the end of the season, so we now that we have to keep improving.”
Verstappen emphasised that the key to being able to perform more strongly than last season, when Red Bull won only twice, will be an improvement in grip levels.
While the car was talked about as difficult to drive, Verstappen insists he was able to adapt to it so it wasn’t a problem and that the overall downforce levels rather than the characteristics will be the key to closing on Mercedes.
“I just wanted more grip, it didn’t mean that it was very tricky to drive because you adapt to the situation you’re in,” said Verstappen.
“At the end of the season, Mercedes stopped developing that car because you couldn’t really see a lot of updates, so we just kept learning.
“We know we had a few issues with that car and we wanted to improve it knowing that the regulations wouldn’t change that much.
“For us it was important to just get on top of that and see this year if we improved it even more, and hopefully [made it] more competitive compared to Mercedes.”
This was also Verstappen’s first taste of the 2021-specification Honda power unit.
There are high expectations for the new engine, which has performed encouragingly on the dyno, given Honda pushed to introduce upgrades that were originally slated for 2022 following its decision to withdraw from F1 at the end of the season.
“I do think we made good steps,” said Verstappen when asked about the engine.
“But the competition is not standing still, so we have to wait and see if it’s good enough – it’s never good enough, but let’s see if it’s competitive enough to fight for the win.”
