Calendar comes back to Red Bull after Austria

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Red Bull team principal Christian Horner believes his team will need to deal with another painful weekend in Austria before the circuits start to suit its car again.

Having won the Spanish Grand Prix and taken pole position in Monaco, Red Bull has struggled at each of the last two races due to excessive tyre wear on low downforce circuits. Horner is expecting a similar scenario in Austria this weekend but is then hopeful there are better tracks for Red Bull which immediately follow.

“I think Austria is going to be a challenge for us, for sure," Horner said. "It’s I think in the top three power sensitive circuits. Maybe there’ll be a chicane on the straight this year…but thereafter we’ve got circuits that we know will come back towards us so it’s sort of get through Austria, damage limitation, before getting into the likes of Hungary, Silverstone, Hockenheim etc."

And Horner says Red Bull struggles to keep its tyres in a manageable operating window when it is running a low downforce set-up.

“I think the configuration that we ended up running the car in in order to be sensible on the straight [in Baku], we’ve put ourselves in a very narrow window.

“I think it’s accentuated by the length of the straight because we’re on pretty much Monza downforce. But I think what’s actually happened (is) the temperatures coming up, the car sliding – and you’ve only got to be a little bit out of that window and you’ve lost control of the tyre."

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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.