Pre-season testing in Bahrain is well underway and talking points are cropping up left, right and centre.
There were no major issues on the first day of testing with Felipe Drugovich being the only driver forced to stop on track with an issue while he was standing in for the injured Lance Stroll.
Red Bull were almost flawless in 2022 after the first couple of rounds, quickly putting their early reliability issues behind them to storm to both championship titles without any real competition.
Max Verstappen won a record breaking 15 races on the way to his second world championship title, making almost no mistakes as be battles with Charles Leclerc in the Ferrari.
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The Dutchman spent the whole of Thursday’s pre-season testing day in Bahrain in the RB19, racking up an impressive 157 laps as well as the fastest lap time of 1:32:837.
While Verstappen’s time in the car was certainly impressive and sent warning shots to Red Bull’s rivals about their capabilities this season, the day was not without its problems.
Red Bull encountered a number of small problems, with the RB19 proving slightly unreliable by running wide multiple times and the team even dropped the car during a practice pit stop, forcing the team to look for different jacks.
“Red Bull, the car ran but wasn’t as reliable as I really expected, there were a few little gremlins in there,” Sam Collins told Sky Sports after the session.
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“They even dropped the car off the jacks accidently in the pit lane towards the end of the session, that wasn’t going to be helpful.”
The pit stop issue will not be too much of a concern to the team as they will evaluate their routines and change any potentially broken jacks to return to their usually high standards in the next session.
While the car did have a few ‘gremlins’ over the course of the day, the RB19 was generally impressive during Verstappen’s 157 laps, meaning that Red Bull will most likely look to make small tweaks to the car and its setup to try and counter these issues.