After a positive second day at this week’s final test in Bahrain, Infiniti Red Bull Racing suffered another setback today, with the team and Sebastian Vettel restricted to the garage for the bulk of the day.
“At the moment we obviously have lots of different problems we are curing,” said Sebastian. “It’s not the best situation to be in but we can’t change it. Everybody is extremely motivated to fix it, but it doesn’t happen overnight. We can just hope for a better day tomorrow and then to have a decent start to the season in Melbourne but at this stage obviously reliability is still a big question mark. It’s difficult to say how long it will take to remedy. I think some things will just come down to the fact that in two weeks’ time we’ll have lots of new parts on the car. We’ve had some damage because of the problems we’ve had here and the parts aren’t available overnight, so from that side I think things will get better over the next couple of weeks. We obviously haven’t done much running but from the little we have done has been quite promising, so I think once we get going the speed should be OK.”
Commenting on the day’s issues, Race Engineering Co-ordinator Andy Damerum said: “Given how well the car behaved yesterday we were anticipating a solid run for Seb today but almost as soon as he went out there was an electrical problem, which meant stopped him on track. We brought the car back, identified the issue, which is one other teams have had but which hadn’t affected us so far, and set about fixing it. We got ready for another run but this time the car stopped in pit lane. We brought it back again and discovered a leak, which we thought we could fix but it turned out that it had caused enough damage that we weren’t able to go out again. Having run so well yesterday it is frustrating to have had these problems today, but all we can do is keep solving the issues.”