The Red Bull RB14 with new upgrades proved to be a nimble piece of kit around Circuit de Catalunya, with Daniel Ricciardo and Max Verstappen within sniffing distance of the top time set by Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton on day one of the Spanish Grand Prix weekend.
Red Bull have unpacked more new upgrades for their car than any other rival team, including a revised bargeboard and floor as well as tweaked sidepods.
The morning session got off to a bad start when Ricciardo pranged into the wall during FP1, but he bounced back in the afternoon with the second best time a tenth down on Lewis Hamilton's time, while looking impressive on the longer runs too
Ricciardo said afterwards, “We have a lot of updates on the car. We are still figuring out how to optimise those, but we don’t seem too far away. We can still make the car a bit better so that is encouraging so it was not too bad in the end."
“This morning I had a mistake, but we cleaned it up and this afternoon was a pretty good session. We got our heads down and did some laps."
"It was important for this new car now - there are a lot of aerodynamicists upstairs - so we needed the laps to give them as much feedback as possible."
“This afternoon the car was better. We can still find some things but we will try and discover some more tonight,” added the Australian.
“The front tyres don’t really seem like they are working well with these conditions, with a lot of understeer and wasn’t able to come back. On the high fuel, it was a bit better. Then we put the softs on and it was a lot quicker. So the supersoft, unless something changes, it doesn’t look like a nice tyre this weekend.”
Verstappen was third quickest and like his teammate content with his day at the office, "The car has been working quite well,” he said. “Of course you always want to improve it but not too many issues. Especially in the long run we had a very good balance, and that’s always good.”
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