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Red Bull has ‘thanked’ Mercedes after the FIA introduced the Technical Directive to address porpoising at the Belgian Grand Prix last weekend. Porpoising has been a key point of discussion throughout the season, and hence the FIA had put forth measures from Spa-Francorchamps to decrease its severity.
The directive caused a lot of discussions as some teams pushed for its introduction more than others. Red Bull was one of the teams against such change and had a dominant performance in Belgium, as they secured a one-two finish with Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez.
The Milton Keynes-based outfit was in no way close to this result at the start of the race Verstappen was 14th on the grid, but he went on to win the race by almost 18 seconds. Whereas Mercedes had a terrible start to their race with Lewis Hamilton’s exit on the opening lap.
The disappointment for the German manufacturer was even more as they were supposed to benefit from the new F1 directives as they suffered the most from the porpoising issue. Hence Red Bull advisor Dr Helmut Marko poked fun at the situation. “Maybe we will have to change something about the chassis because of Toto’s new guidelines,” he said. “They worked very well this weekend! We thank him. It seems that Mercedes have fallen back even further!”
This sentiment was shared by the RedBull team principal Christian Horner, who went to thank Toto Wolff for the technical directives. “On the face of it, I’d probably have to thank Toto for the TD! In all seriousness, I think this circuit has played to our strengths,” he said.
Horner further talked about they have found the perfect car-driver combination with their RB18 and Max Verstappen while pointing out their strategy to take penalty here. He said, “We have a very efficient car, we’ve found a very good setup and Max has just been in phenomenal form the very first lap in first practice. Obviously, strategically we chose to take the penalty here and 14th became 13th technically as the starting point with everybody else.”