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F1 European GP: Red Bull bemused by ‘strange’ tyre performance

Christian Horner says Red Bull is undergoing a thorough analysis into why its car's race performance has altered unpredictably on different Pirelli tyre compounds.

Despite qualifying strongly in both Canada and Baku, Daniel Ricciardo and Max Verstappen each saw their race pace fade against its front-end rivals with the pair taking underwhelming seventh and eighth place finishes respectively in the Grand Prix of Europe.

Horner has pinpointed the performance in the softer tyres not matching the expected speeds in Baku while the RB12 working better than predicted on the harder compounds.

With these unknowns surfacing for the second consecutive race the Red Bull team principal says his squad will look into the problems and look to fix the issues next time out in Austria.

"It's a difficult one to understand really," Horner said to Sky Sports. "Just on the super-soft and the soft tyre we had very high degradation and couldn't do the lap times.

"So then we went onto the hardest compound and the car came alive on that compound, Max has set the third fastest lap of the race so a bit of homework to understand what exactly has happened there. Very, very strange. Last week it was too cold, this week it was too hot.

"It's something that we've missed in the last few grands prix that we've got to get on top of because we've qualified well here, and in the first two laps Ricciardo had no problem going with Nico and then suddenly bang the tyres have gone off. It looks more accentuated on our car than any others."

Zdroj: crash.net