Red Bull adviser Dr Helmut Marko has confirmed that the upgrade his team are bringing to the Spanish Grand Prix will not quite enable them to reach their “minimum weight.”
The Milton Keynes side are said to have lost up to 5kg with the changes they made ahead of the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix a few weeks ago, and it has helped Max Verstappen to two wins on the trot in Imola and Miami.
The Austrian outfit looked quicker than Ferrari in both of those races, and that is despite still not managing to get their weight down to the 798kg limit set by the FIA.
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While they are starting to get there, Dr Marko confirms that they will need to wait until after the Spanish Grand Prix before they do.
“We plan our updates in such a way that we always lose weight with each update, because unfortunately we still haven’t reached the minimum weight and we won’t quite reach it with the next update either,” he told Motorsport-Total.com.
The 79-year-old described rumours that Red Bull have gone through most of their development budget as “nonsense,” and he is also sceptical as to rumours that they are running a tighter line than Ferrari.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“It’s true that the increased logistics costs are a problem. But it’s not just us, it’s Ferrari and all the other teams.”
Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz suffered start-up issues ahead of his final qualifying lap in Australia which put him down to ninth, before crashing out of the race having made a poor start when he was forced to change his steering wheel.
The Spaniard also suffered accidents in qualifying and the race in Imola, before colliding heavily with the barrier in practice during the Miami Grand Prix weekend.
Further, Ferrari were forced to make alterations to their engine specification after reliability concerns, so the Austrian suggests that both teams have likely spent a similar sum.
“I don’t think we are in a significantly different position to Ferrari in this respect,” he explained.
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“Especially as I wonder what effect it has on them that Carlos Sainz has already crashed the car several times. It can’t be cheap.”
Red Bull’s reliability failures in Bahrain and Australia might also have set them back, but Christian Horner previously waved away any implications that they have a “fragile” car.