The Red Bull Racing team had a difficult run in the 2018 Formula 1 British Grand Prix with the car just losing too much time on the straights due to the power deficit and to add to it, Max Verstappen was hit by a brake-by-wire issue.
The brake-by-wire problem is fairly common in F1 but to be hit by that issue straightaway on the opening lap was not in Verstappen’s memo at Silverstone when Red Bull were already on the backfoot considering the power deficit.
The Dutchman did push to third after fending off Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen with the problem seemingly cured itself then, however, it came back to bite him at the second safety car re-start which eventually led him into a spin and a retirement.
Before that, he had a huge back and forth tussle with Raikkonen with the Finn taking the position on higher power. “It was weird because on Lap 1 I had a brake-by-wire issue and the paddle fell to the floor in Turn 3, but then it recovered and everything was going fine.
“Let’s say like that, but then after the second safety car, I braked for Turn 16 and the paddle just literally went to the floor and then the rear brakes locked up and I spun off the track,” he explained.
“[But whole race] we were too slow on the straight to do anything. With Daniel [Ricciardo] also when he was attacking [Valtteri] Bottas, when we opened the DRS we had the same speed as them without DRS.
“So, you can’t do anything and you could see all the time when we had the safety car and we had a drag racing, we were [just] so slow – it was a joke [really],” adding that the deficit all weekend made it look like it was a F2 engine against an F1 unit.
Team principal Christian Horner also mentioned that they were losing about seven percent of time on the straights alone which gave them no chance to be able to fight the Mercedes and Ferrari – they ended up in a no mans land with the rest of the pack also well behind.
Meanwhile, Horner revealed that they decided early on to stop Ricciardo twice in a gamble. The safety car period seemed like, it played against him but Horner said even if he had stopped under it, the double-stack still wouldn’t have allowed him to gain position.
The team weren’t sure which strategy will work the best and so they went for the split option but the safety car period handed them with a free stop for Verstappen which they opted to take unlike Mercedes.