Red Bull’s progress in the turns “confused” the Honda’s engine

In a very short time, Red Bull felt a great deal of progress with its curtain car, which was confusing to electronics on Honda’s engine, which caused Verstappen to missing power in qualifications for Great Britain GP

In Silverstone qualifications, Verstappen quickly and aggressively squeezed the gas pedal thanks to the downfoce and adhering to the new RB15 aero package and went much faster through the turns, confusing the electronics of their drive unit.

The result was a little delay in delivering power when Verstappen squeezed the gas pedal, but despite this problem, the Dutchman was only 0.183s slower than Bottas, who won the pole position.

Verstappen estimated that this problem cost him between one and a half to two dozen, and Honda explored this problem to solve it to Germany. Namely, Red Bull has gained a lot of downforce with its upgrades, which significantly improved their performance in turns and there were problems with the calibration of the drive unit. The engine was not properly programmed and did not expect such fast and aggressive gas applications, resulting in a delay in power delivery.

The boss of the Austrian team, Christian Horner, confirmed that the problem come from the improvement of the chassis and that Verstappen used gas in a way that was not possible before, which caused the drive unit to be “confused”.

“It’s the speed at which Max squeezed the gas,” Horner said. “We have not seen this before, but these are things that you can solve on a dynamometer.”

First, a turbo problem was suspected, but Honda’s technical director Toyoharu Tanabe says that in Sakura they are analyzing to better calibrate the engine.

“We talked to Max about the details of the problem: when it happened, in which revolutions per minute, in which area the compressor was pressed, how it squeezed the pedal when it felt the problem.”