Liuzzi Impressive on Debut

By Ian Lockwood
April 25 2005

For the first time this season Red Bull Racing failed to score any points. The car lacked raw pace all weekend. The disappointing result for the team as a whole has masked what was actually an impressive race for F1 rookie 'Tonio Liuzzi.

Having failed to make much headway in Sunday's final qualifying session the Red Bull duo of David Coulthard and 'Tonio Liuzzi lined up 15th & 16th on the grid separated by only eight hundreths of a second.

It was a tough race for Red Bull. The speed of development of other cars relative to Red Bull Racing which began to show in Bahrain was fully evident at Imola. On the plus side, both cars finished the race which was more than could be said for Ferrari, Renault, Mclaren & Minardi. 

The highlight of the race for Red Bull Racing though was the performance of new boy 'Tonio Liuzzi. Starting behind his highly experienced team mate, Liuzzi leapfrogged DC at the start and stayed in front of him for the whole race. This is the first time DC has been outperformed by a team mate in a race this season. Liuzzi had been voicing concerns over his fitness levels, having never done that many miles under race conditions before. He passed the test with flying colours "I thought the race would be difficult for me because of fitness, but I feel pretty ok. The car was quite good really. The balance was good, but there just wasn’t enough speed, so we have to improve." 'Tonio was also climbing all over the back of Williams' of Mark Webber towards the end of the race "I wanted to overtake Mark so I tried to make something crazy but it didn’t work. Can I say that?" In the end Webber managed to hold on crossing the line just 0.4 secs ahead of Liuzzi.

Where does this leave Tonio in his battle for the second seat with Christian Klien? Obviously CK scored points in his opening two races for the team. Liuzzi didn't score but this is more down to the relative competitiveness of the car. To shine in F1 your first job is to beat your teamate. CK has always been a little off DC's pace during a race. Liuzzi did beat DC finishing in 10th place (Ralf Schumacher having been given a 25 second post race  penalty for a pit lane incident) to DC's 13th.

David Coulthard “At the start I was a bit slow away from the grid. I was running around ok but then had a bit of a bump with Massa, which broke part of the floor. We went backwards from there and never really came back. The race was pretty lonely actually, just going around in circles. The car didn’t have great race pace – we knew that from yesterday – so I was expecting to struggle a bit. But I still thought I’d have a better balance than I did. There was a lot of oversteer.”

Christian Horner, Sporting Director

“Obviously 11^th and 13^th is pretty disappointing after three consecutive point-scoring races. Tonio drove an excellent race on his grand prix debut. He was consistent throughout and made a very solid start to his F1 career. David had a couple of knocks from Massa and I think this damaged his car slightly. From a reliability point of view we’re ok, but we need to take a step forward in performance. We hope to see that at the forthcoming test in Jerez.

 

Günther Steiner, Technical Director

“I am not that happy with how we performed in the race today. But the car was reliable and didn’t have any problems. In comparison with qualifying I think this is the best we could have achieved.  “

 

David Prigg, Cosworth

“Once more Cosworth has succeeded in powering Red Bull to a double race finish, which successfully completes the second event mileage on both David's and Tonio's engines. David's engine has accumulated more than 1200km and with a completely problem-free weekend, again demonstrates Cosworth's ability to provide a reliable and competitive product ”

 

Ian Lockwood