Red Bull Racing targets BMW Sauber this season

31 May, 2007

BY OUR AUTOMOBILE CORRESPONDENT

Red Bull Racing might have had a slow start in 2007, but the Red Bull boss, Dietrich Mateschitz, believes his team can beat BMW Sauber this season.

The Adrian Newey-designed RB3 car had failed to match early expectations and Red Bull Racing is yet to score a point. In fact, the team ended with a tenth place finish as their best result so far, said a report. Significantly, BMW Sauber started the season strong. The team is currently placed third in the standings, just behind McLaren and Ferrari.

The Red Bull supremo believes his team has a lot of potential and takes consolation in the fact that the team is ahead of world champions Renault. This has made Mateschitz stay adamant that his team has enough potential to beat BMW later on. Red Bull has been hard at work to try and solve their problems, and both Mark Webber and David Coulthard showed progress last time out in Bahrain before being hit by reliability issues.

After taking care of these issues, Red Bull has indeed made progress. David Coulthard had raced through the Bahrain field from 21st position on the grid to seventh place. Webber was again in the top ten in qualifying. Though the Red Bull Racing cars were seventh and eighth in the Bahrain race by overtaking Renault, Williams and Toyota, it would be foolish to talk about Ferrari or McLaren-Mercedes as possible opponents in the first proper year.

Dietrich Mateschitz says that BMW Sauber has made a solid step ahead, but BMW Sauber is its challenge for the year. The real goal before Red Bull Racing is to finish fifth in the constructors' championship in 2007, he feels. The latest progress in Barcelona and Canada has made the Red Bull boss confident of making it possible.

According to Mateschitz, Red Bull's issues are related to their new wind tunnel, which was not yet calibrated when Newey began working with it. The first tests in December and January had made it clear that the results from the tunnel were not to be converted to the race track, he said.