Red Bull plans to make more progress at the next race by debuting a seamless-shift gearbox.
The technology, already used by many of the team’s immediate competitors including Williams and Toyota, will be ready for the Spanish grand prix next month and tested at the Circuit de Catalunya before the official event.
Red Bull’s motor sport advisor Helmut Marko, although admitting that much work is still to be done on the reliability of the RB3 car, insisted in Bahrain that the team is now the fourth quickest in pit lane.
“Everyone was talking about our crisis,” he told the news agency ‘APA’, “but at the beginning of the season we were a second and a half behind Williams and now we have overtaken them.
“Here we were even (competitive) with Renault. We have made giant steps.”
Marko, a former grand prix driver himself, defended the decision to give Austrian countryman Christian Klien the elbow and replace him for 2007 with an Australian, Mark Webber.
“We took a lot of criticism for (dumping) Klien,” he said, “but Webber being among the top ten qualifiers at all three races so far justifies the decision alone.”
