During a recent interview broadcasted on Servus TV, Red Bull Racing chief designer Adrian Newey said that Lotus and Ferrari were simply lucky to score victories this season.
Servus is Red Bull’s television channel in Austria.
After scoring wins in the early part of the 2013 season, Lotus and Ferrari declared that they had developed their cars to suit the original 2013 Pirelli tires better.
On TV, Newey claimed that they were just plain lucky.
“We had a big change over the winter, an unexpected change,” declared Newey.
“Pirelli introduced a new tire which was much more sensitive, it was very easy to overload it and because our car, a lot of its lap time is under braking and in the high speed corners, where you’re putting a lot of load into the tires, we couldn’t really exploit that without the tires going off very quickly.”
“So that tire change hurt us and helped some other people, such as Lotus, Ferrari perhaps. For me that was purely luck,” Newey added.
“I think Lotus and Ferrari are making big noises about how clever they were over the winter to read that far. But to be perfectly honest they were just plain lucky, we were a little bit unlucky, and of course the politics take over. So it’s been a challenging year but a very rewarding one,” the British engineer said.
Lotus and Ferrari won three of the first five races but haven’t scored any victories since. When Pirelli introduced its revised tires after the British race (tires that better suited the Red Bull RB9), Sebastian Vettel started winning again. In fact, the German won eight of the nine of the last races.
Servus is Red Bull’s television channel in Austria.
After scoring wins in the early part of the 2013 season, Lotus and Ferrari declared that they had developed their cars to suit the original 2013 Pirelli tires better.
On TV, Newey claimed that they were just plain lucky.
“We had a big change over the winter, an unexpected change,” declared Newey.
“Pirelli introduced a new tire which was much more sensitive, it was very easy to overload it and because our car, a lot of its lap time is under braking and in the high speed corners, where you’re putting a lot of load into the tires, we couldn’t really exploit that without the tires going off very quickly.”
“So that tire change hurt us and helped some other people, such as Lotus, Ferrari perhaps. For me that was purely luck,” Newey added.
“I think Lotus and Ferrari are making big noises about how clever they were over the winter to read that far. But to be perfectly honest they were just plain lucky, we were a little bit unlucky, and of course the politics take over. So it’s been a challenging year but a very rewarding one,” the British engineer said.
Lotus and Ferrari won three of the first five races but haven’t scored any victories since. When Pirelli introduced its revised tires after the British race (tires that better suited the Red Bull RB9), Sebastian Vettel started winning again. In fact, the German won eight of the nine of the last races.