Horner guesses at reason for faulty DRS Verstappen: 'Maybe too ambitious'
16:12, 23 May 2022
3 Comments
Max Verstappen won the Spanish Grand Prix despite a broken DRS system on his RB18. It seems that the problem was not only in the activation system of the opening rear wing. Team boss Christian Horner is guessing at the actual reason.
Verstappen had the greatest difficulty in passing Mercedes' George Russell. During the race in Spain, the Red Bull driver had a working DRS one moment and not the next. It was expected that something was wrong with the activation system of the DRS, but Motorsport-total.com reports that there may have been more to the problem with the rear wing.
Wrong move by Red Bull in battle of the kilos?
The medium shows with a photo by F1 technical expert Giorgio Piola that Red Bull was dealing with small cracks and holes that could be seen on the wing after qualifying. Before the race, the team repaired the upper wing. It is likely that the damages returned during the race and that the problem has to do with the strength of the material.
For teammate Sergio Perez, there was nothing wrong with the DRS, so it remains unclear what exactly caused Verstappen's wing not to open on command. Still, Horner thinks it may have to do with the fact that some parts of the RB18 are now too light. The team has been working on saving weight since the beginning of the season, as the car is well above the maximum allowed weight. Horner thinks the team has been a little too ambitious. With that, the team boss seems to insinuate that (the material of) the lighter wing is not resilient enough.
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The wimpy wing will not appear on the Red Bull in Monaco. They lightened the wrong part and they know it
Max this is Christian. Please only press the button once. 50 times is not going to do anything.
The DRS on Max's car works every time on the back straight between turns 9 and 10, but it sometimes does not work coming down the front straights.
The wind was mainly blowing from West to East during the race.
This means that the DRS flap had no issues deploying when there was a tail wind but it sometimes did not want to open when the car was driving into a head wind.
On the on board camera shots, we see it sometimes open and closes again on the main straight. This is because Max was pressing the button numerous times trying to get it to activate.
The problem is if it is already open, when Max presses the button again, it then closes. So, some of the times that it looks like it didnt work, it was because Max actually opened, then closed it again.