Red Bull Racing’s correlation issues hindered them in the early stages of the race weekend in Japan, which the Austrian team managed to turn around, giving Max Verstappen a reason to prove ‘why he has number 1 on his car’.
Despite the time Verstappen and new teammate Yuki Tsunoda put in the simulator to find the right configuration for the punishing Suzuka circuit, when the team first ran the RB21 they found that the data from the simulator failed to match that of the track.
Horner saw Red Bull getting the car into the right window
How close to reality, then, is the simulator, and how trustworthy can it be when cross-referencing the data against the information gathered from actual on-track running? “Inevitably those questions always get asked, and the biggest sensor that you have in the car is the driver”, said the team principal in the Red Bull hospitality.
“All credit to the team this weekend, that at the beginning of the weekend we looked like we were out the window. We managed to get the car into a decent window and then Max Verstappen demonstrated why he’s got the number one on the car“, Horner summerised Red Bull’s successful weekend in Japan.
