Red Bull are confident that the technical trouble they encountered on the second day of pre-season testing will have no long-term consequences, once the initial frustration of losing significant track time subsides. Max Verstappen kicked off Red Bull's running in Barcelona with a whopping 147 laps on Wednesday, as the RB18 broke cover, but teammate Sergio Perez was limited to around half of that total on his first stint in the car. Perez ground to a halt in the final sector on his 39th lap of the day, around half an hour before the lunch break, with Red Bull later confirming that a gearbox problem was the cause of the Mexican's stoppage. Eventually returning to the track midway through the afternoon, Perez managed to edge past a race distance, working his way up to 78 laps.
Red Bull "happy" with their F1 testing progress
Despite the setback, which he described as a "pain", Red Bull's Head of Race Engineering, Guillaume Rocquelin, saw plenty of positives in the day. "Checo got up to speed pretty quickly this morning and his feedback is pretty much the same as Max's, which means we know where we are going and everything is fairly settled," he explained. "Every time the car comes back to the garage we're making changes and fine-tuning the direction so, all in all, I'm happy. "We had a small issue today, which meant we lost around half a day's running, but we aren't particularly worried about the problem itself, it is just a pain that we lost that time. "However, it shouldn't affect things in the long-term, as we have a solid platform and we're happy with the progress we're making.”
Perez takes "good learnings" around his stoppage
Perez was also optimistic after his first experience of the RB18, after placing eighth overall with a personal best time set on the Hard (C2) tyres. "We took some good learnings from today and I'm pleased with that," he reflected. "We are trying some very different things and we have a lot of information to work through, so I think in the meetings it is important to go in-depth and give the engineers as much feedback as possible. "The issue with the gearbox took a little bit longer to fix than we expected, but it is fine – it's expected that these things happen at testing."
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