Red Bull team principal Christian Horner is confident the inherent differences between the grand prix circuits in Melbourne and Malaysia will help his drivers turn the tables on McLaren in race two of the Formula One season.
There is little opportunity for teams to improve their cars with just a week between the opening two races, but the Malaysian GP has the potential to force a very different running order.
The Red Bull cars should be more suited to the sweeping high-speed corners of Sepang than they were for the sharp turns on the street circuit at Melbourne’s Albert Park, and Sebastian Vettel’s second-place finish in the season-opening race has given the team plenty of encouragement.
“We knew from winter testing that McLaren were competitive but our race pace was every bit the equal of theirs,” Horner said after the Australian GP. “Malaysia is a very different prospect from here.”
“Melbourne is short turns, bumpy, not a lot of high-speed corners, but Malaysia offers that variant, so it will be interesting to see how quick (McLaren) are in Malaysia.”
McLaren earned two spots on the podium in Australia, with Jenson Button winning and Lewis Hamilton in third place. For Red Bull, Vettel was close to Button and Australian Mark Webber wasn’t far behind Hamilton in fourth place.
“We can win this if we improve the car at a quick-enough rate,” team principal Martin Whitmarsh said. “So that is clearly what we are going to set out to do.
“We have got two fantastic drivers and a strong team and now it is up to us. We are starting from the right place.”
“He (Button) has such a mature, laidback, easy manner that belies the underlying hunger to win that he has,” Whitmarsh said. “He must now believe that he is in a good chance of a proper title run this year.”
The two main perceived challengers to McLaren and Red Bull are Ferrari and Mercedes, and both teams will be eager to get on top of their problems after contrasting races in Melbourne.
Ferrari was well off the pace in qualifying, but Fernando Alonso’s fifth-place finish was a better-than-expected return for a team that is still in the developmental stage of refining its 2012 car.
Mercedes’ first race was the opposite. A strong performance in qualifying was followed by a curious lack of pace and it netted just a single point from the race.
A switch from the mild autumn twilight of Australia to the intense heat and humidity of Malaysia will greatly alter tyre grip and wear, but no team is sure how the new Pirelli compounds will perform at Sepang.
Lotus goes to Sepang buoyed by a promising performance in Australia, where Romain Grosjean qualified a surprise third before an early collision ended his race, and big-name signing Kimi Raikkonen drove creditably from 18th on the grid to finish seventh.
Another team looking to build on a good showing in Melbourne is Williams. Pastor Maldonado crashed out on the final lap when pressuring Alonso for fifth place. Had he held on for sixth, he would have gathered more points than the team did in the entire 2011 season.
