Red Bull Sandbagging in Barcelona?

Recent testing in the month of February has brought forward several allegations within the F1 paddock that some teams might consider doing late “glory laps” with their cars low on fuel and equipped with soft or super-soft tires in an attempt to please the sponsors.

Well, not the same thing goes for Red Bull Racing apparently, with the latest media reports suggesting that the reigning world champions have actually used sandbagging techniques during the recent group test in Barcelona.

According to reports, Vettel's quick laps on Friday and Saturday – when he topped the field in the timing sheets – were not the result of the techniques reminded in the first paragraph, as the Red Bull RB7 was filled with fuel from the get go. Meaning that if the reigning world champion didn't even simulate a qualifying run and scored the best time of the session, we can make a pretty realistic idea of the season ahead and the way Red Bull will march through it.

“With the new tires it is difficult to interpret performance over a lap, whether it's your own or someone else's,” said Vettel, trying to play down reports of sandbagging.

Indeed, the high level of tire wear of the Pirelli compounds make it impossible to predict the true performance of an F1 car in testing, with gaps between lap times from 3 to 6 seconds. Even so however, one can predict that Red Bull and Ferrari are a step ahead of everybody else at the moment, as suggested recently by the very motorsport advisor of the Austrian team, Dr. Helmut Marko.

“We are having problems with the tires, but less problems than the others,” further revealed the Red Bull official, according to Austrian newspaper Kleine Zeitung.