Red Bull chief engineer Paul Monaghan insists that the team has not given up on winning the 2024 Formula 1 constructors’ championship despite slipping back to third place after last weekend’s Mexico City GP.
Red Bull now has 512 points to the 537 of Ferrari and 566 of leaders McLaren, while Max Verstappen retains a relatively comfortable lead over Lando Norris in the drivers’ version.
The team hasn’t won a Grand Prix since Verstappen’s triumph in Spain in June, although he did win the Austin sprint.
“We’re pulling well, and the fight is still on,” said Monaghan. “If we can get both cars into high point-scoring positions, we make it harder for the opposition to then pull away in the constructors‘. And if you get two cars in there, maybe we can claw it back.
“There’s still plenty of points on the table to improve. So I’m not shunning the constructors’ championship in any way.
“I don’t think we need to question the motivation of our Dutch superstar as to whether he’s up for defending his drivers’ championship.
“So we will present the cars in the best manner we can, to the best of our abilities, and try to extract the most out of them.
“And then it’s based on the opposition that really determines how we prosper at the end of the year.”
Monaghan indicated that the team knows how to improve the RB20 for this weekend, although the sprint format makes life difficult for all teams to hone their cars.
“We have got a good idea of what we need to do,” he said. “It’s whether we can execute it well enough that our relative pace is good or better than that of our opposition. And that is a Sunday afternoon challenge.
“We’ll see a little bit in the sprint race, but I think Sunday will present more difficulties. And we’ll see what the weather brings. The forecast is fairly mixed. That might mask all of the work we’ve done. We’ll see if we come out good or bad.”
Meanwhile Monaghan admitted that the team has to help the struggling Sergio Perez find better form.
“This is the person that’s been on the podium in the first three or four races of the year,” he said. “So he can drive – of course he can drive. He can be quicker than he is at the moment.
“We’ve just got to try and work out what we need to give him to help him get there, and it’s in our interest to do so. We prepare the cars to the best in our abilities, and whatever he needs, we’ll be trying to offer.”
For this weekend Perez still has a different floor spec compared to Verstappen, while he has also switched chassis.
“Checo is on a different edge specification from Max,”he said. “So if you look at the edge wing itself, it’s subtly different. It’s a small difference. The magnitude is, I would argue, small enough that it’s not going to cause him to have a significant difference to Max.
“We’ve done it like that purely and simply because it’s the best way to service two cars, and ensure that we can service them fairly with spares.”
He added: “We’ve changed him back into a different chassis, which we can do. And he asked if we can. And the boys got a bit of work, but they didn’t mind.”
Asked by formu1a.uno if the team had addressed the brake issues Perez highlighted in Mexico Monaghan said: “I don’t know that was anything particularly wrong with the car,” he said.
“We can vary the temperatures of the brakes, equally can vary them if he sits in traffic. and so on and so on and so on. To answer your question, yes, I think we’ve resolved the doubts we have over those.”
