F1 News
Date: 31/August/2011
Red Bull Racing's chief technical officer, Adrian Newey, was seen drying his eyes at the end of Sunday's Belgian Grand Prix - and it wasn't because his drivers, Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber, had finished first and second.
Newey was emotional drained from the stress caused by a tyre set-up gamble in qualifying, which meant both his drivers began the race on blistered tyres that some feared could fail after just a handful of laps.
Red Bull's gamble had been to exceed Pirelli's recommended amount of camber - the amount the top of the tyre leans inwards - which offered a short-term performance benefit, but had caused the inside shoulder of the tyre to overheat and 'blister'.
Reducing the camber - the maximum recommended level is four-degrees from vertical - for the race would have meant starting in pitlane. Rival teams were against Red Bull being allowed to change tyres on safety grounds, since their actions had created the risk.
Ultimately, Red Bull decided to start on the blistered tyres, but pitted Webber as early as lap 3, then Vettel on lap 5.
But whilst the 'damaged' qualifying tyres were soon changed, the potentially catastrophic risks caused by the excessive camber hung over the team for the rest of the race - at a track with some of the fastest corners in the world.
"We had a lot of concerns going into the race after the damage we had on the tyres from qualifying. We took quite a lot of risk," confirmed world champion Vettel. "We had reason to be confident that it should be fine, but you never really know.
"The alternative would have been to change the set-up and start from the pit-lane. We took that risk.
"We had some long discussions last night and this morning. Now we are sitting here, it all went well and we finished one-two - but it wasn’t an easy decision to make. You are driving into the unknown."
Team-mate Webber praised his team for keeping both drivers fully informed.
"Credit to the team for the way they handled all the problems," said the Australian, who sympathised with the pressure the team were put under.
"It was not an easy grand prix for those guys on the pit wall, watching their two drivers out there. It was reasonably sensitive for them.
"It was pretty stressful last night, pretty stressful this morning," Webber admitted. "We are not just talking about blisters, we are talking about unknown characteristics of what the tyre might do.
"It was handled well from our team’s perspective, by putting the drivers right in the discussions to understand how we could get through the grand prix as safe as possible.
"I was giving them feedback on how the tyres looked. The main thing we were interested in was looking at the fronts on the inside shoulder. My set after qualifying was in a very bad way so we had to get rid of those very quickly."
The blistering remained an uncomfortable factor for both drivers during the race, but never developed into anything more serious and certainly didn’t hurt their performance.
"It was pretty scary to go around with blistering issues," confessed Vettel. "It’s not very comfortable, especially on the way down to [the flat out] Eau Rouge and Blanchimont corners.
"You look at the tyre and it doesn’t look like being in great shape and you feel quite a lot of vibrations."
Vettel won the race by 3.7sec from Webber, with McLaren's Jenson Button 9.6sec from victory in third. Vettel's seventh win of the season means he is now comfortably on his way to a second consecutive world title.
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