Alarm bells ringing at Red Bull

"This, by far, is the biggest challenge that we've faced."

Those were the words of Red Bull Racing team boss Christian Horner on the eve of the first running of his team's RB10, as he reflected on everything involved in the creation of a 2014 Formula 1 car.

With the end of the first pre-season test at Jerez in sight, his comments couldn't be any more fitting for the situation in which his title-winning team finds itself.

The F1 circus had travelled to Jerez expecting an intriguing week. In the end, the biggest surprise has been the scale of the mountain that Red Bull has found itself needing to climb before the final tests in Bahrain and the first race in Australia.

Jerez so far has been, in the politest of terms, 'character-building' for Red Bull. In harsher terms you could say it has been a disaster.

A combination of an incorrectly mounted part that needed refitting ahead of day one, plus Renault's energy-store problems and some overheating woes have left Red Bull firmly on the back foot.

The team itself has been coy about the problems - team principal Horner, technical chief Adrian Newey and chief designer Rob Marshall were spotted jumping into an Infiniti and heading off early without a word uttered to the media.

Horner made an early exit on Thursday © LAT

That wall of silence said all you need to know about the difficulties the team is facing.

But rather than this being a problem that can be pinned purely on Renault - the French manufacturer does indeed have some issues it needs to address - it appears to go much deeper than that and to be one of shared responsibilities.

Sources with good knowledge of the situation suggest that as well as the specific electrical problems Renault has acknowledged, another major issue is the ultra-tight installation of the power unit in the car.

While the hardware supplied to Renault's four teams - Red Bull, Toro Rosso, Caterham and Lotus - will be identical, how each team packages it in its car is different.

Renault engine chief Rob White has talked of 'important' differences between the packaging among its teams. Those are probably enough to explain the disparity of issues between the car makers' trio of squads at Jerez (with Lotus absent).

It's widely known that Newey does not accept compromises that get in the way of his drive to design the fastest racing car he can, whether those compromises are drivers or engines.

That approach has prompted talk that the Renault power unit's packaging inside the Red Bull is very aggressive.

Newey's designs are always no-compromise © LAT

While that is indeed the case, and has contributed to the problems, sources with good knowledge of the situation are clear that the fitting in the RB10 was approved by both team and engine maker.

It wasn't a case of Red Bull pushing things too much, or Renault underestimating cooling. Instead it's simply a matter of things not working.

The overheating issues that have manifested themselves in smoke signals from the car will require some repackaging to solve.

And let's not underestimate the cooling issues that teams face this year, with the MGU-K generating three times the amount of heat last year's V8 KERS did.

Perhaps a factor in the early installation issues is that efforts to bring the Red Bull car and Renault power unit together came so late, without the long lead time of cooperation from which rivals have benefited.

It was interesting to hear Ferrari technical director James Allison talk this week about how much the engine team of Maranello had moved to help the chassis crew.

"They were bending over backwards for us on the chassis side to make sure that they produce an engine that is packageable, and that allows itself to be cooled with radiators that are manageably packageable in the car," he said.

By contrast, we've been offered clues this week about how late Red Bull was with the design of its RB10.

It's perhaps intriguing that, while many teams have talked about working on their designs for two years, and passing crash tests weeks ago, Red Bull only started work on passing its crash tests 10 days before the Jerez test.

A rare sight: Ricciardo on track © LAT

Beyond the lateness of the car, the 'compressed' development cycle that Newey has talked about has added pressure, with Renault admitting that the demands had been shifting.

White revealed last week: "We've created some moving targets as we've gained knowledge of the power units and how they will behave, in terms of the power unit, all the heat rejection and all the electrical circuits.

"It's been quite a big challenge on the chassis side to deal with a moving target on our side."

It's that word 'challenge' again. But if any team has shown that it can rise to a challenge, it's Red Bull.

Those who suggest that Red Bull's Jerez test disaster means its championship hopes are already over are speaking way too early. The first race is still more than 40 days away...

Jerez was always going to be about uncovering problems and discovering what needed to be fixed before Melbourne. That's why the test is a week earlier than normal, and that's why there is extra time before the second test in Bahrain.

Red Bull is not short of resources and, if it needs to undertake a major repackaging of the car and come up with some revised cooling, then it can and will be done.

There'll be some long nights coming up in the corridors at Milton Keynes, and some pretty frantic calls with Viry-Chatillon over the next few days. A hard slog lies ahead.

But victory in Melbourne will not be decided here in Spain. Nor in Bahrain. It will be decided on March 16.

As Daniel Ricciardo said with some assured confidence about his new car on Thursday night: "She'll be all right..."