TACTICS
Red Bull’s balancing act
Verstappen required an innovative mix in Sochi, says Mark Hughes
Max Verstappen’s strategy from his penalised back-of-the-grid start in Sochi had to encompass many variables, far beyond just the usual tyre choice and pitstop timings.
The Sochi track gives good lap time reward for downforce, but the complication is that from the final corner, through the flat-out kink of Turn 1 and down to Turn 2 is one of the longest stretches of flat-out running the cars see all season.
So you need the downforce for the lap time but low drag for overtaking, which is always the case of course but at Sochi that conflict is particularly acute.
Red Bull has two families of rear wing, a relatively conventional higher-downforce one and the low-downforce spoon-profiled component with the outboard ends of both main plane and flap heavily cut away where the greatest drag is created. The natural Sochi wing is the higherdownforce one and it was with this that both Verstappen and Sergio Pérez ran Friday practice. Even on Friday, the weather forecast for Saturday qualifying insisted on a 95% chance of rain, so pushing teams even further towards loading up with downforce. But in FP1 Verstappen had encountered the Williams of Nicholas Latifi on track, a much slower car, but could find no way past it, even using the Red Bull’s DRS. Not a good omen.