Redbull ready to hit back.

First round in Austria didn't go as planned for the Milton Keynes based team. First of all Verstappen ended with a DNF due to an electrical failure in Lap 11. Then "The Incident" with Hamilton and Albon. This has seen and had a lot of views on the matter so at this point we should move on and look forward to the next race. 


Both Redbull drivers have had their say about the upcoming weekend. They know they had some weaknesses during qualifying but had good pace during the race. Verstappen said they had a team BBQ (in his bubble) where they discussed the upcoming race. He has also mentioned that there may be rain expected this week which will be interesting as no one has tested their 2020 car in the wet. This is looking to be a very exciting weekend. 

Albon:
"I feel ok. In some ways I tried to switch off my thoughts after Sunday’s race and take the positives from the weekend. The car is in a good window, we’ve still got a bit of work to do but we’re there and we can fight – that’s the main thing. The biggest shame is we didn’t capitalise on the race and we didn’t get the points we deserved, but I’m going into the weekend confident. I feel like there are areas to improve on in myself and as a Team, but I’m feeling good and ticking down the days to Friday. There will be a slightly different atmosphere this weekend because we know the track and the car, nothing has really changed from the last race, so it will just be about fine tuning things and working on the areas in the car Max and I have been talking about.
I think there’s less anticipation heading into this weekend now we’re in a rhythm. We know where the car is at, driving and set-up wise, we know what’s needed, so there are less unknowns and now it’s just time to do the business. Get into the weekend, fine tune things and close the gap to Mercedes."

Verstappen:
"I feel good but of course the result was not what we wanted" He reflected about last weekend "which was to score a good amount of points and fight for the win. I was looking good for a podium which I thought was easily possible because it was basically between Mercedes and myself on raw pace. But then you also look at how the whole race panned out, we could have scored a good amount of points against Lewis but it is what it is, we can’t change it and now I’m looking forward to hopefully having a more positive weekend. We were a bit down on pace compared to Mercedes in qualifying so we definitely need to close that gap to fight them in that area rather than on strategy. Our pace is usually a bit better in the race than in quali but there is still quite a bit of work to do which the engineers are flat out on. We have ideas and the direction to work on for this weekend so that’s positive.
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"I’m looking forward to racing on the same track again this weekend and it’s a good opportunity to get a better understanding of the car. Whatever we found wasn’t perfect last weekend we can improve this week. On the same track I always think it’s quite nice to do a direct comparison, depending on the weather, and hopefully we can do better this time. It looks like it could rain this week and I’m not sure anybody knows how competitive they are in the wet with these new cars so that could be interesting. I always enjoy driving in the wet, I don’t mind it, but to be quick you need both the car and driver to be 100%."

The Syrian Grand Prix starts on Friday with Free Practice 1 at 10am. Lights out on Sunday is the same time as last weekend at 14:10. We had a lot of excitement about last weekend being the first race back, but i think that this will have even more of a buzz around it because of the unforseen circumstances of the last race. Plus Redbull will be back with a vengeance.