“We didn’t speak about it once while he was there,” he said, “but I’m relaxed
at the moment. At some stage we’ll sit down and talk.”
While his future remains a topic for conjecture, Red
Bull has been obliged to take a small step into the past. A few
hours before the German GP, the eligibility of the team’s car — specifically
the electronic mapping of its Renault engine — was brought into question by
Jo Bauer, technical delegate of motorsport’s governing body the FIA.
It was subsequently cleared to compete, but a technical clarification has
since been issued and Red Bull will henceforth have to revert to a range of
engine maps used during the season’s first four races. The rules hadn’t been
broken, but have received a subtle tweak between races.
“There has been a lot of talk,” said Sebastian Vettel, Red Bull talisman and
defending world champion, “but the level of fuss in the press doesn’t
reflect the extent of any changes that have actually been made to the car.
It isn’t as if it will suddenly become uncompetitive.” Rémy Taffin, Renault
Sport’s head of F1 track operations, does not believe the change will make a
great deal of difference.
“The current engine specifications are frozen in mechanical terms,” he said,
“so the only way you can look for performance improvements is to experiment
with maps.
“From the start of the year we’ve been probing ever more deeply into the
kind of mapping we used in Germany — it evolves race by race, like every
other bit of the car. We can’t do that any longer, so we’ll have to look
elsewhere to find the next hundredth.”