Red Bull can unearth “free gains” from Honda’s power unit with better packaging going forward, according to Chief Engineering Officer Rob Marshall.
Red Bull has linked up with Honda for 2019 and already secured the Japanese marque’s first podium since its Formula 1 return in Australia’s season-opener.
Red Bull has repeatedly praised the base it has to work from with Honda and accepted after the Bahrain Grand Prix that its biggest challenge was in getting its RB15 into the right operating window.
“We can see areas around the power unit to focus on packaging-wise,” said Marshall in an interview published by Red Bull’s fuel partner ExxonMobil.
“They aren’t necessarily big bits but there are probably four or five areas where we think, if we could change that, that would be better.
“You add five of those five things up or even three of those five things and you make a tangible gain.
“It’s almost like free gains, if you know what I mean, as in no real performance cost on Honda’s side.
“It’s just making different bits and moving a few things around.
“They are very open to our suggestions and equally, we understand when they say that’s a bit tricky or we don’t want to do that because there’s a reliability risk associated with that.”
Marshall added that Red Bull has been buoyed by its new collaboration with Honda in the wake of spending the latter years of its partnership with Renault as an out-and-out customer team.
“Our relationship with Renault, it’s well known, went up and down,” said Marshall.
“There were times when they were frankly brilliant and were fully focused on helping us get to the front.
“Then they got their own team and understandably the focus was on that. There were a few things we couldn’t do.
“With Honda, it’s quite different. We sit down together and decide what is best.
“When we have our meetings, we don’t talk about what makes the power unit fastest or the car fastest, we talk about what development collects the most championship points, so you take the risk of reliability into it as well.
“That’s how we decide whether to do something or not. So it’s quite a different approach.”
Red Bull holds third position in the Constructors’ Championship.
