Red Bull hoping for fast start to 2018 in Australia

The Red Bull Racing team is hoping to see some immediate success in the first race of the 2018 season next weekend.

In last year's Australian Grand Prix, Max Verstappen finished in fifth place behind the Ferrari and Mercedes cars. His team mate Daniel Ricciardo retired mid-way through the race with power unit issues.

"Melbourne in 2017 was a combination of my errors and some misfortune," Ricciardo recalled. "I crashed in qualifying and then we had a technical issue for the race.

"We were all putting our hand up saying 'my fault' last year," he said, before adding that he intended a very different home race this time around.

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"2018 is definitely time to get what we deserve in Melbourne" he insisted. "Or get what we came for, that sounds better!

"I can’t wait to get the season started. I’m hanging out to get back on the track and these new cars are very fast.

"The RB14 compared to the RB13 at this stage last year is a lot different," he continued. There is a fair bit of aerodynamic change this year."

Verstappen is also hoping that the team has made a big improvement over the off-season period.

"We are hoping to have made a large step forward this year and be competitive from the start," he said. "To have a fast car from race 1 and continue for the rest of the season would be great."

The Dutch driver says he expects qualifying to be critical in Melbourne.

"Albert Park is not the easiest track to overtake on," he noted. "We will try our best but the straights are not quite long enough. And a lot of the corners leading to the straights are 90 degrees which makes it hard to set-up a pass.

"The trees around the circuit sometimes make your braking markers hard to spot with shadows," he added. "It’s quite normal on a street circuit but makes it more challenging for us to get it right."

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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.