Christian Horner: Approaching Striking Range

While it's already obvious which teams will fill the top three places in the world championship table at the end of the year, behind them the pecking order is anything but clear.

Red Bull, Renault, Williams, Toyota and Honda are all in the mix, while Toro Rosso and Force India are also quick enough to get into that battle.

The stakes are high for everyone in that group, because over the course of the season a few tenths in lap time could mean the difference between being fourth or eighth or ninth in the world championship.

One of the teams with a lot to prove is RBR, following a stressful 2007 season during which the Milton Keynes outfit clearly underperformed.

Over the winter the wind tunnel provided misleading results which meant the RB3 was born with some fundamental problems, and Adrian Newey and his men had to address those while at the same time understanding what went wrong with the tools. Meanwhile dreadful reliability, which cost crucial winter track time as well as some results, did not help.

It was all something of a test for team principal Christian Horner, the man chosen by Dietrich Mateschitz to put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together. He's now confident that this year the team is back on track, and handy scores by Mark Webber in the past two races lend some credibility to that.

"It was a tough season last year," Horner admits. "But what we saw was our tools converging to basically the point where we could have a lot more faith in them, and put performance on the car.

"At the beginning of the year there were some anomalies in the wind tunnel, and that was quite hard for Adrian. A key aspect of the year for him was understanding the validity of the tools, having had no involvement in RB2 or its predecessors.

"RB3 was the first car that went into the Bedford tunnel. It was showing some interesting results that went onto the launch car. And from the first test, with the comments that came back after Mark and David [Coulthard] drove the car, on the plane on the way home Adrian knew that fundamentally something was wrong.

Adrian could only rely on the results that he was getting, it was only when the car went on the track that he saw that there were some anomalies.

"So then he reverted to his experience and CFD, while we chased certain issues within the tunnel within its commissioning. We upped the scale from 50 to 60 percent, and there were some fundamental changes that Adrian implemented to get on top of it. And now with Peter Podromu also working we've got much better correlation between wind tunnel and track.

"We pushed the boundaries of CFD, which is where pretty much all the development was done during the first half of the year. We learned a lot, and in hindsight, it was an interesting exercise.

"The key is understanding your tools, what you can rely on and what you can't, and that fundamental understanding is in place now. As a result we shouldn't fall into the same traps that we experienced at the beginning of last year."

The crisis was successfully addressed. But looking back it must have been pretty stressful going into a new season knowing that the wind tunnel, an absolutely fundamental piece of kit for any F1 team, had left Newey high and dry.

"You've got the best conductor with no orchestra!' Horner says with a smile. "Basically, through the year we aggressively pursued putting those tools in place, and correlating them.

"Certainly the impact of the Bridgestone tyre is not to be underestimated, the impact that had on aerodynamics. The encouraging thing was for the first time at Red Bull we developed throughout the year, we were putting performance on the car until the last quarter [of the season], and genuinely in the last three races both in wet and dry conditions we were very competitive."

The team ultimately scored 24 points, but it could have looked so much better.

"Reliability was our Achilles' heel, and it cost us close to 30 points during the season, and that was a key aspect we had to get on top of," Horner says.

"Basically it was the lateness of the engine decision, and the inherently poor design ...

"We were polishing something that wasn't particularly good form the outset. We had a restructuring within our transmission group, and from that point onwards, it improved significantly, but was far too fragile.

"The final piece of the jigsaw for me was recruiting Geoff Willis. Now we have a very balanced technical group, with Adrian focusing on performance and Geoff really managing a technical infrastructure that Adrian feeds in to. So there's a lot of process, and with that should come better design, and better reliability."

Attracting Willis, left in the lurch by Honda politics, was something of a coup.

"Knowing that Adrian and Geoff had worked together in two different teams, Adrian and I first talked about it around French GP time, and from there very quickly came to a deal during the Silverstone weekend," Horner recalls.

"We had to wait for Geoff to be contractually free from his Honda obligations, and the fact that they knew each intimately meant that there was no honeymoon period. He got straight on with the job.

"Geoff's enjoying it because he doesn't perhaps have the constraints he had at Honda from Honda being an R&D exercise in F1, so he has autonomy within the technical group, obviously reporting to Adrian. He very much is the technical manager."

The arrival of Willis and the focus on getting the aero side sorted gave the team a lot of confidence as the RB4 came together.

"For the first time going into the winter there was very controlled development, an evolution of a theme, continuity of engine partner," Horner says. "And we got rid of driver aids, which were probably not our strongest point anyway, not being a works team."

As Horner says, the paramount issue that the team had to address over the winter was of reliability, something that proved so expensive in 2007. With the four-race gearbox requirement added to the mix, the team had to get it right.

"In terms of our winter testing, it was more comprehensive than any previous season at Red Bull Racing," Horner says. "We completed more miles, and we had extremely good reliability. The pace of the car improved almost with every test. From that respect it was a very positive winter.

"We doubled the mileage to what we saw last year in pre-season testing, and on various gearbox components we did in excess of 4000kms. It's a massive step from where we were last year, when we struggled to make it to 200kms! The guys in the transmission group, and modelling and analysis, did an excellent job.

"I think the whole group is working together well. They had 18 months working together, and this is the second car to come out under Adrian. Obviously with Geoff joining the team last year he's had a good impact in the way that the design group is managed."

Despite the optimism, the first race in Australia brought disappointment. Webber was second on Friday afternoon and sixth on Saturday morning, but when it counted in the afternoon he was stopped by a brake disc failure. Stuck in 15th, his race was ended by a Turn 3 collision that left him with broken suspension.

David Coulthard was running in midfield when he was assaulted by Felipe Massa. The way the car's suspension subsequently fell apart raised a few eyebrows, although Horner insists that it was a freak impact.

"The problem in Australia was unusual parameters for the car, in that Massa stuck a wheel up the inside and launched DC at a reasonable speed, the car came down at an acute angle on the front left wheel, and that caused quite a lot of damage," he explains.

Worse was to come, for the very next time that the cars took to the track - on Friday morning in Malaysia - the Scot was involved in another incident. This time a suspension failure pitched him off the road, and again the car seemed to fall apart in surprisingly violent fashion when it subsequently jumped the kerbs. That was enough for the FIA to call up Newey and other team members and ask what was going on.

"Obviously the start of the weekend wasn't great, with a big engine failure for Mark, and a track rod failure that caused a sizeable accident with David," Horner says.

"It was a brand-new component. You can call it infant mortality, where a titanium sleeve on a carbon rod had failed. It had passed all its proof testing and final testing to become a raceable component, but it immediately failed. It forced him to go off track, he then hit a large bump, which nose-dived the car into the wrong side of the kerbing, which then caused a catastrophic-looking suspension failure."

The team made changes to the part that had caused the original off, but remained convinced that the secondary failure - like that in Australia - was simply down to the freak nature of the impact.

"Basically we were confident that the tolerances that we had were well within the operating parameters," he says.

"We'd done over 10,000kms of testing at Barcelona, Jerez and Valencia, and they all have very aggressive kerb strikes, and obviously we had not had any issues at all.

"I think with the weight distribution the cars now run at, if you get air, you come down on the front end. The speed of David's accident was similar to Timo Glock's in Australia, where he hit with a similar effect.

"We absolutely understand the FIA's response. They were very responsible, they worked with us, they wanted to understand the issues.

"We just worked with them throughout the weekend to demonstrate the integrity of the components and what we were doing to address the issue with the track rod, and they were very sensible and rational in their approach. As the governing body it's their prerogative to take an interest in key driver safety issues."

It was perhaps ironic that the team in the spotlight was also the one with two veteran drivers known for their safety campaigning. Webber expressed a few concerns to the media, but both men showed their faith in the team, and got on with the job.

"They never ever had any suspension issues prior to this one, and they've got a lot of confidence in the design team," Horner asserts.

"David in his career had far worse failures than that. They never brought into that any question."

Webber earned his reward when he logged the team's first points of the year in seventh, while DC finished two places behind, demonstrating that the reliability was there. The frustrating thing for the team was that the Aussie's race had been badly compromised.

"The pace of the car in the race was reasonable, but we had the handicap of having to carry a lot of extra fuel with Mark," Horner says.

"He had an air pump fail very early in the race, which meant we had to stop him two laps short of his scheduled stop, and put additional fuel in to compensate for the air pump. He carried an extra 17kgs of fuel for the rest of the race, which is approximately half a second a lap from his pit stop onwards.

"That cost us around 12-15 seconds, and that combined with Sato on his out lap being particularly unhelpful was the difference between Heidfeld beating us or not. Really, we should have finished ahead of Heidfeld.

"But both drivers drove a strong race, and we got a couple of points in a race where both BMWs, both McLarens and a Ferrari finished. There are areas where the car is very strong - in high-speed corners in Malaysia you could see we were very strong, in comparison to the McLaren, even. Slow speed and traction are the areas that we need to work on."

There was disappointment in Bahrain when Webber just failed to make it into Q3, but he made up for that in the race. Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button all had early problems, but he also passed Nico Rosberg on his way to another seventh place, finishing a few seconds behind Jarno Trulli.

"It was a good afternoon," says Horner. "I think it was probably the closest we've ever been to the front of the pack in terms of start to finish, with all the competitive runners still running.

"It just demonstrates how the grid is closing up. Having done the hard part in Q1 to go through on two sets of prime with Mark, we just missed out on making it into the top 10, after he dropped a tenth and a half on the middle sector on his second run.

"Mark drove an excellent race, just chasing Trulli all afternoon, fighting over a tenth here and there. It was a good strategy, good pit stop discipline, and Mark did his bit.

"We were obviously disappointed with the grid position, but in the race we had good pace, and you could see that even compared to Kovalainen's McLaren we were doing very, very similar lap times. I think if we can unleash a couple of tenths in Spain it will really move us forward.

"David had a bit of a shocker. It just didn't go his way throughout. He got attacked at the first corner, and thereafter he set about proving that the suspension has no issues at all! So having incurred a lot of damage at the first corner and picked up a puncture he was always on the back foot after that. It was a frustrating race."

Four points in three races may not be much to shout about, but they have been achieved on merit, and have given the team something to build on.

"If we think back 12 months ago and look at where we were at this stage of the year, I think we're in a much stronger position now," Horner says.

"We've just got to keep our heads down. We've got some obvious areas where we know we can improve, and we've just got to focus on those areas over the coming weeks and try and get performance from the car as quickly as possible, which is obviously what all our competitors are doing. But we're confident that we can move forward. Time will tell, but everybody is working extremely hard on the package."

A handy comparison is provided by the performance of engine supplier Renault. Alonso's opportunistic fourth in Australia has given the works team something of a points cushion, but in the last two races RBR has left the Spaniard behind.

"Renault is a good benchmark for us," Horner agrees. "I think Fernando incurred some car damage in Bahrain, because for us to be 30 second ahead is unusual. But they are a yardstick for us, they're the world champions of two years ago, and they've got a former world champion in the car.

"But we haven't just got to beat Renault, we've got to beat all the others ahead of us as well. Generally we're content with the way things are progressing.

"As you can see with BMW, you unleash a bit of potential, and bang, you make a step. The big three are probably getting into diminishing returns now, through stability in the regulations, and you're seeing a closing up of the pack.

"It's almost F3-type margins. Now with the engine and the common ECU and so on there seem to me marginal differences. It very much comes down to chassis and driver."

Last week's test gave some indication, but this weekend is when we'll really see who has got their sums right with their update packages. For RBR, there can be no more excuses.

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