Red Bull Racing team’s Adrian Newey claims McLaren copied their exhaust system – Formula 1 news
According to Red Bull Racing team director Adrian Newey, McLaren copied the RB7’s exhaust system on their new car MP4-26 after they upgraded their car at the first free practice session in Australia that took place this past Friday.
McLaren were well off the pace of Red Bull during the pre-season testing period but it seems now that McLaren are performing better than Ferrari to say the least who were looking quite competitive as compared to Red Bull.
The team applied a much simple and better exhaust system which Adrian claims is a copy of the RB7’s system which helped Lewis Hamilton score the 2nd place at the season opening race that took place in Australia.
“McLaren made a huge leap forward - by copying our exhaust, it has to be said. But the bottom line is they still made huge leaps forward. I am sure they will be pushing us hard,” Newey said.
Newey acknowledged the new system and the impressive progress McLaren made for which Red Bull should take some credit as well.
“We think it (the exhaust) works for us. It seems it also works for McLaren. It's a form of flattery but it's a bit of a pain if they then beat you with it,” he added.
Adrian then stated that Red Bull Racing team is going to try its best to run the Kinetic Energy Recovery System on its car for the Malaysian Grand Prix as the team did not use the device for the Australian Grand Prix which turned out to be a huge success
for Red Bull.
“If we feel it's reliable then we will try to race it. We will have to make that decision on Friday evening (in Malaysia). KERS is a benefit off the start line. So even if you are on the front row, without KERS there's a risk that you won't be first into
the first corner,” said Adrian.
However, he added that Red Bull have packaged their new car in quite an aggressive manner this time but that has not been a problem for the team at all. The main problem for the team currently is relatively trivial. KERS is not a complicated system at all
and the team is planning of using it more in the future.
Other than that, he acknowledged Sebastian Vettel’s performance at the Australian Grand Prix as the reigning world champion was miles ahead of the rest of the pack.
The Malaysian Grand Prix is going to be quite interesting as Ferrari have revealed that they are improving their car for the upcoming race while McLaren are also working on their car in order to decrease the gap between them and Red Bull Racing which would
make things more interesting and entertaining at the upcoming race.
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