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Max Verstappen’s regular complaints about the number of races in the Formula 1 season meant it was significant that he was also fielding between grands prix in the two-year-old Red Bull RB18 at Imola on Wednesday.
His testing there was related to the team’s ongoing work to improve the pavement and bump problems that had made recent races, particularly the Monaco Grand Prix, difficult.
Described in some quarters as a “secret” test, it is true that Red Bull did not go out of its way to publicize this race.
However, the regulations allowing so-called ‘ex-car testing’, currently defined as those for the 2020-22 season, require notification of the FIA and all competing teams – so this was completely by the book as part of the team’s regular running. . In fact, many teams regularly run a TPC race, sometimes using existing race drivers, without publicly announcing that they are doing so.
Often used as a way to give junior teams’ drivers Formula 1 mileage, it is certainly unusual for a race winner – especially the current world champion and championship leader – to do a TPC mid-season.
TPC regulations only allow cars to run to period-exact specifications, so a used 2022 car will not have newly designed parts to be trialled for use. The rules also stipulate the use of Pirelli academic-specification tires – colloquially known as test tyres.
Instead, it was all about giving Verstappen a direct comparison of the current car compared to what it looked like two years ago so he didn’t have to rely on memory.
“We really tried to give Max a reference from a previous car,” said Paul Monaghan, Red Bull’s chief engineer. “When you’re trying to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of an existing car, his reference is the current car, which is ‘In previous years, we had this, we had that.’
“[But] Are we really? Because we didn’t run them at the same time. So when we got that car out, we tried to give Max a reference to judge it from and he was able to give us feedback from that.”
It was all about refreshing Verstappen’s memory, not only of how the car behaved but also likely how it responded to different settings – and at certain altitudes – with such experiences potentially allowing Red Bull to learn something as well as benefit. For Verstappen.
When asked if this experience had changed the feedback Verstappen made, Monaghan suggested the impact was more about validating his feedback and helping build knowledge about how to address weakness.
“Which [feedback] “It’s not going to change like that, we’re just giving it a different reference,” Monaghan said. “The strengths and weaknesses of the cars or how we perceive them, we can obviously judge them compared to our opposition. But we mix that with his comments, check those comments, and say: OK, are we good? Are we bad?”
“[We can] Look at the data, see if it is correct to say that we are better or worse than some people, what is his perception, why does he say that? Then what on earth do we do about it?”
A running day at Imola will not have suddenly eliminated that limitation for Red Bull, as it is the result of a car designed to run with a high level of lateral stiffness at the rear.
However, by revisiting past glories, Verstappen will have ensured the accuracy of his impression of whether the problem has gotten worse, improved, or stayed more or less the same. It will likely play a small role in contributing to the knowledge the team is building in hopes of addressing limitations without giving up more performance in other areas.
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