Red Bull expecting 'intense' build-up to Melbourne

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With pre-season testing now complete, teams now have just under two weeks until they're out on track in Melbourne.

That means time is very short indeed to implement any changes and still get their cars and equipment out to Australia in time.

Red Bull's head of race engineering Guillaume "Rocky" Rocquelin acknowledged how tight everything now was. However he was sounding confident about the team's preparations.

"In terms of the tests as a whole, broadly speaking we’ve achieved what we wanted to do," he said on Friday.

"We wanted to get some longer runs done," he said of the final day's programme at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya. ""It was worth sacrificing a bit of time to make sure the car would run smoothly.

The best pre-season testing times overall from Barcelona

"There were a few niggles but that’s always the case with a new car and we knew how to manage those situations.

"We’ll now have a pretty intense couple of weeks before Melbourne – as every team will – digesting all the information, putting permanent fixes in place for the issues we found, and working on a plan of attack for the first race."

In overall times for pre-season testing, Red Bull's Max Verstappen was sixth fastest. That was eight tenths slower than the best lap set by Kimi Raikkonen in the Ferrari. Verstappen's team mate Daniel Ricciardo was a further half a second back. Overall Red Bull completed 684 laps in Spain compared with 1096 for Mercedes and 956 for Ferrari.

However Rocquelin was appropriately bullish about the team's 2017 prospects.

"Do I think we can be competitive? I think so. We’re happy with the balance and happy with the performance.

"Some teams put in some impressive lap times but there are so many parameters at play in testing that it’s extremely difficult to form a really clear picture of where everyone is.”

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.