Red Bull One Month Behind Schedule

By Racing Bulls
May 5 2006

According to Christian Klien, the cooling problems and reliability issues that Red Bull Racing endured in pre-season testing have put the team about one month behind schedule. Despite this, the Austrian is positive about the upcoming race and believes that the RB2 does have the necessary pace to move up in the World Championship.

Q: Christian, you missed this race last year; is it one that’s difficult to learn or one you know quite well?
Christian KLIEN: Actually, I know it quite well. I think I did the most races here in all the lower categories and in all the lower categories that I raced here, I won the race, so I quite like the circuit and I hope that that helps me this weekend.

Q: What are your feelings about Red Bull at the moment; do you think they are where they should be?
CK: Yeah, for sure we should be further up. We had so many troubles in the last couple of months. We’re still running about a month behind schedule because we had these cooling problems at the beginning of the season and we had a lot of reliability problems in the races. I think the car has the pace and if everything works well – like in Bahrain and Malaysia, we had the pace, we were there, but we just couldn’t finish the races. We had some good tests in Barcelona and also last week in Silverstone, so we hope that we can get back on the road and get good results again.

Q: Your team mate says that good testing doesn’t necessarily mean good races.
CK: Yeah, but it’s important to have good tests as well. We’ve sorted out a few reliability problems and for sure that will help us in the races as well.

Q: So you feel this one should be better.
CK: I feel it should be better. We’ve had a lot of bad luck in the last couple of races, so all the bad luck is gone now and we should get some (good) luck back.

Q: (Dan Knutson – National Speedsport News)  Question for all five of you: you’re race drivers who like to go fast. This year the cornering speeds are higher than ever. Are the cars more fun to drive than last year, and the second part of the question is, are we getting to the point now where the cornering speeds in some corners with limited run-off areas might be too high?                                                                                                                                                          CK: We were testing last week at Silverstone and the speed in the corners was quite a bit higher, and for sure, that’s fun but then you have to think about the run-off areas as well. For example, Liuzzi had a big shunt in a high speed corner last week. It’s nice for drivers to be quick there through the high speed corners, but then safety has to be a higher priority.