Red Bull’s Team environment hurting their Championship goals in 2010
Arguably, the Red Bull Racing team has the best car this season for all 19 circuits in the 2010 calendar. None of the races they won this year came due to luck or fortune. When they win, they win by some margin and hence stress the supremacy of their cars. They have won half of the races in this season and both their drivers have been on the top step of the podium on more than one occasion.
This is a team with cars that have unmatched pace, upgrades that are everyone’s envy, mechanics who are the best of the lot and drivers that are equally good and win big. But what do most other teams have? – failed imitation of Red Bull upgrades, one driver that is competitive and the other who retires half way into the race and finally cars that are not reliable to finish in back-to-back races.
Given their superiority, Red Bull Racing should have wrapped up the season by now, similar to what Brawn GP did last year, but instead the Austrian team is constantly finding itself behind McLaren - both in the Drivers’ as well as the Constructors’ Championships. The answer is simple. Despite everything else, Red Bull Racing does not have what McLaren has – consistency and team harmony. At least they haven’t shown it yet.
McLaren’s prolonged stay at the top of the championship table did not go well with Red Bull who thought that they should be the one heading the standings. After their failure to dislodge McLaren from the top spot on the track, they tried some off-the-track tactics to lure them into failure. Before the British Grand Prix 2010, which was expected to be a huge event for both British drivers, Mark Webber announced that soon Hamilton and Button will collide with each other on the race track because neither will want the other to win. Soon afterwards, many others joined the Australian in passing similar comments about the McLaren duo.
But all that these judgments did was cautioned Hamilton and Button and their team. Both drivers said that the atmosphere in the team was superb and they enjoyed a wonderful working relationship with each other. They said that their rivalry is limited only to the race track and it is far from destructive. So far in the season, nothing has happened between the two to suggest otherwise. In fact, building upon their claims of harmony, the two have appeared in public together on several occasions. Recently, the two drivers took their ‘friendship’ a step further when Jenson Button gave Hamilton a ride home after the British Grand Prix and the latter said that he would be willing to return the favour on any given day.
As far as favouring one driver over the other was concerned, McLaren Boss Martin Whitmarsh cleared any lingering doubts when he said that the Team has not given the status of number 1 driver to Hamilton just yet. It was expected that preference will be given to the leading driver when it came to scarce upgrades but McLaren have rejected the idea and said that Button hasn’t given up and is too close to Hamilton in the standings to be ignored. Whitmarsh backed Button and said that a driver who is second in world championship and recently finished 4th from 14th has all the potential to win the championship.
While such behaviour brought the McLaren Team together, Red Bull, on the other hand, gave way to a war of words amongst their ranks. The situation wasn’t already ideal after Vettel crashed into Webber during the Turkish GP, as the Australian added fuel to fire when he brought up the issue of being treated as the number 2 driver of the team. He mocked at his team after winning in Britain through car-to-pit radio and said the result wasn’t bad for a second choice driver.
Webber criticized the team’s decision to hand over his new wing to Vettel after the German broke his wing before the Silverstone race. He believed that the real victory was to beat Vettel in an old car fitted with an old wing. Red Bull’s assurances regarding impartial treatment to its drivers have not been good enough for Mark Webber who continues to believe that Vettel is the preferred one.
Instead of calming things down and focusing on the German GP, Red Bull have hit back at Webber to make matters worse. Team Advisor Helmut Marko has said that Webber has won more races than Vettel; the latter has had to face a plethora of problems during 2010 from defective spark plug to lose wheels to failed break disc to defective chassis to transmission problems. He said that if anyone should complain, it should be Vettel and Webber should be thankful because the team gave him the opportunity to win.
Before Red Bull, Webber drove for Minardi, Jaguar and Williams and won nothing in his career. Given the way Webber already feels towards his team, Marko’s reality check will not go down well with the Australian driver. This is not all though as one of Red Bull’s engineers has shifted the blame back to Webber. The unnamed engineer revealed that Webber was not happy with the new wing and thought that the old one was better. On the other hand Vettel liked the new wing. It was when Vettel’s wing broke that Webber set his heart on the new one and objected the decision to equip Vettel’s car with the only remaining upgraded front wing.
At this point in the season when Red Bull is under pressure from the top management to win more titles, one driver wins the race while the other ruins his chances to gather points. Instead of fighting with their rivals on the track, they have staged a conflict within the team. If this continues, it is likely that the Austrian team will make it easier for McLaren to walk away with the titles. If they do not catch up with McLaren sometime soon, no amount of consistency on the track and no amount of love in the garage will help them regain the lead.
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