RBR Mid-Term Report Part 2 - Paul Monaghan
By Ian Lockwood June 30 2008
Your primary judgement of your car’s performance is relative to that of your opposition. At the start of the season, both drivers were happy with some aspects of the car and less impressed with other areas. In terms of our pace, we were comparable to our nearest opposition.
Your primary judgement of your car’s performance is relative to that of your opposition. At the start of the season, both drivers were happy with some aspects of the car and less impressed with other areas. In terms of our pace, we were comparable to our nearest opposition.
Therefore it was reasonably encouraging as we saw no major flaws and reliability was good which meant we could do lots of miles which enabled us to run our development programme. We have had some strong qualifying and race performances from the car in the first half of the season so, overall, reasonably pleased would be the verdict. We had one incident in the first grand prix which set us back slightly for the next couple of races, but we got on top of that. Of course, it was never part of our plan to have a big accident in the first race! But having fixed it we were confident to run the car in all situations from then on. No car is perfect and some areas were clearly in need of development. Our two drivers commented on traction, possibly expecting more than the car could deliver. A lack of balance was another criticism and we worked on ironing out the extremes so that we could get a faster lap time by delivering more consistent performance. And we've been reasonably successful at that. The most obvious lack of performance is that we're not running at the pace of the fastest car! We are making progress in getting nearer to that goal. In terms of tyre behaviour, the RB4 is working well. We made a significant step in understanding this aspect of performance in Bahrain and have continued to improve in this area race by race. In Canada, we were in very good shape as far as tyres were concerned which was actually quite surprising thus confirming that we have not experienced all the problems that other teams have had in this area. We have had a few updates of varying magnitude through the first half of the year: we had a good step for Barcelona, but we have drip fed small changes into the car throughout the year which have helped us move forward rather than remain static. For the remainder of the season, we have more upgrades planned and it's a case of prioritising their introduction. We are now looking at finding better lap times, because the car is reasonably well balanced, so we have to pinpoint any remaining vices and work on those to improve our lap times. We will still have to develop this car, even though this is the time of year when the following year's car looms large. Which upcoming tracks will suit us? Ask me at the end of the year. Seriously, the car can be made to perform competitively at most of the tracks as we have seen from the first half of the season. We have scored at nearly all races in the first half, so why shouldn't we continue to do that for the second half of the year, only higher up the order and picking up more points.
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Re: RBR Mid-Term Report Part 2 - Paul Monaghan
Posted by: RedWebber07 (IP Logged)
Date: 2008:06:30:17:15:58
sounds somewhat positive.
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grandprix.com: 'It must be nice for the Australians to know that the rest of the world heads for Melbourne when they want advice about F1.'
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grandprix.com: 'It must be nice for the Australians to know that the rest of the world heads for Melbourne when they want advice about F1.'
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