Max Verstappen extended his championship lead with his victory in Monaco and ensured that Red Bull also wins the sixth race of the season. Nevertheless, the racing team should not be completely satisfied with the weekend in the port city. The reason for this is an incident during qualifying.
In Q1 Sergio Perez crashed his car. The Mexican’s car was removed from the scene of the accident with a crane. Well visible for photographers and other teams: the underside of the Red Bull.
“It’s very impolite to look under people’s skirts. Everyone was up in the air at some point this weekend. So it’s the same for everyone,” team boss Christian Horner tried to defuse the situation.
“I think pictures are taken in and around the paddock, they come in vans and they work on the cars with the shutters closed. Each team uses spy photographers to take pictures of the cars when they’re disassembled.”
Mercedes and Ferrari look ‘prehistoric’
Ted Kravitz, a reporter for “Sky” in England, however, believes that Horner’s composure is partly feigned: “Of course they will hate it. Especially when you compare it to the bottom of the Mercedes and Ferrari, which we also look at saw cranes. They look prehistoric.”
He added that it’s no longer surprising that Red Bull have outperformed the other teams so far this season.
Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff, meanwhile, made no secret of the fact that he didn’t like the fact that Lewis Hamilton’s W14 was towed away by crane and not by truck as usual after an accident in FP3: “Whoever did the crane probably used to work for the Cirque du Soleil.”
However, the teams don’t have much time anyway to analyze what they have learned about the underbody of the Red Bull. The next race is already on the agenda in Barcelona next weekend. Then Red Bull wants to celebrate the seventh victory in the seventh Grand Prix.