Red Bull Racing closed Friday’s free practice for the Austrian Formula 1 Grand Prix with the impression that further progress is needed to contest the front rows. Max Verstappen stated that the team is still pursuing the car’s ideal balance, while Isack Hadjar reported difficulties in extracting the full potential from the new upgrade package.
The work in Spielberg was marked by tuning adjustments and by evaluating the updates brought by the team for the weekend. While the early signs are positive in some aspects, Red Bull believes there is still room to extract performance before the qualifying session.
Verstappen finished both TL1 and TL2 in fourth place and highlighted that the car’s behavior remains distant from ideal: “During today’s practice sessions it was a bit tricky to find the right balance. We need to work on grip between the front and rear and find the right compromise. That will help us gain a bit more pace, because at the moment we’re not yet at the level of the others,” he said.
The four-time champion believes the focus now is to improve the stability of the RB22: “Let’s see what we can do tomorrow to obtain more stability overall, and I hope for a good qualifying session,” he said.
Hadjar, who was 12th in TL1 and rose to seventh in TL2, also assessed that the team faced difficulties in extracting the car’s full potential and from the updates: “We had trouble extracting the maximum from the car and from our upgrade package, because it seemed unbalanced. In TL1 we started a bit late and struggled with the lack of grip, so it was somewhat a guessing game.”
However, the Frenchman did see progress in the second session and believes that pace could appear on Saturday: “The balance was better in TL2, which is good news. The car was much easier to drive, so the pace should show up tomorrow, but we’re not where we want to be yet. We need to work a lot on the setup, but typically the car comes alive in the qualifying session and I hope we find a good rhythm,” he added.
Pierre Waché, the team’s technical director, explained that problems in the garages affected both cars in TL1, especially Hadjar’s, who lost track time. According to him, the team used TL2 to test different setup configurations while trying to understand the behavior of the new package, admitting that some changes worked and others did not.
Waché emphasized that it is still early to conclude whether all the updates deliver the expected performance, since the team only knows its own data. Still, he stated that the long stints were promising compared with Barcelona, while the qualifying simulations still need to improve: “We’re focused on this and hope to see a positive result tomorrow,” he concluded.
