Red Bull chief engineer Paul Monaghan responded to claims the RB21 is “twitchy” by saying that will be “relative”, with all cars facing differing degrees of the same phenomenon.

Helmut Marko hinted recently that changes may be made to the second car alongside Max Verstappen to help make the car more driveable, with Liam Lawson having been rotated out of the seat after only two races.

Red Bull chief engineer responds to ‘twitchy’ RB21 claims

Verstappen spoke positively about his feelings heading into the weekend, but admitted Red Bull were “not where we want to be” in terms of pace.

While the reigning World Champion has often been heralded for being able to get the most from the Red Bull package, his team-mates have often struggled by comparison – with Alex Albon having compared a previous Red Bull model to a ‘computer mouse’ in terms of its front-end sensitivity, which makes it tougher to drive.

Both Sergio Perez and Lawson echoed the difficulties of the car to drive, and when asked about the feedback of the car, Monaghan said how much the drivers feel behind the wheel depends on what they’re driving, with every car feeling similar sensations to varying degrees.

Admitting Red Bull addressed the “flaws” of the RB20 while maintaining as much performance as possible, the challenge now is adding speed whilst remaining stable.

“So how twitchy your car is, or how nervous your car is, perhaps you’ll say that it’s relative,” Monaghan told reporters at Suzuka.

“I bet there are 18 other twitchy cars in this pit lane that all of us, myself, probably the most, would find really quite difficult to drive.

“So you’re trying to get your car as balanced as you can make it and we’re, what, one, two tenths off the quickest car in the pit lane.

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“Now, last year’s one had some flaws, and we’ve addressed those flaws, quite significant, quite well, without giving away much lap time, in my opinion.

“Now, we’ve got to try and get this one to be a little bit better. And if we’re two tenths off in a five-and-a-half-kilometre circuit with 20-something corners, if we find a few hundredths in each corner, all of a sudden, we’re on the pace of the current lead car.

“I think it’s easy to overstate that we’ve got a difficult car to drive, but they’re all quite difficult.

“Now we’ve just got to try and get a little bit more speed out of this one, try and improve its stability to the point that the drivers find it easier to drive.

“And if we can do that and put some lap time onto it, we’ll be in the hunt. There are 22 races to go, we can do that.”

Given Sergio Perez struggled to drive the RB20 last season and Lawson endured similar issues adapting to the RB21 this time around, it was put to Monaghan that the team had been putting more focus on making the car more driveable, with neither driver able to extract similar levels of performance to Max Verstappen in the sister car.

In reply, Monaghan responded: “I would say that’s a little speculative, because it’s a different car, different year.

“Poor Liam, perhaps he was a round peg in a square hole and it just didn’t work for us. So what’s done is done, as far as I’m concerned, and we’ll support Yuki as best we support Liam, as best we can support Max.

“In terms of a Constructors’ Championship, it’s in our interest to get the best out of both cars. So whatever lessons we can take from the first two [races] from either car, we will take and we’ll put on here, and it doesn’t matter who drives it, it’s our car, our pride, our championship.”

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