Red Bull will Fight Back

Red Bull Racing Australia will use its Clipsal 500 Adelaide mistakes and penalty as motivation to improve its performance, team owner Roland Dane has vowed.

That’s a chilling warning for all its rivals, considering RBRA still won two out of three races last weekend and leads the Drivers’ Championship clearly through Craig Lowndes as well as the teams’ pointscore.

But five-time and defending V8 Supercars Champion Jamie Whincup languishes in seventh place after an uncharacteristically fraught 250km mini-marathon last Sunday.

“I am almost glad we are not performing at our best because it would give us nothing to build up to,” Dane told v8supercars.com.au.

“It gives us motivation to do better next time and keep everyone on the front foot.”

The Red Bull crew had trouble changing the right rear tyre on Lowndes’ Holden Commodore VF in Saturday’s first 125km race and then Whincup suffered the same delay in the second race.

On Sunday Lowndes blistered a tyre which forced him to stop early and then go on to a fuel conservation strategy, which allowed Holden Racing Team’s James Courtney to take a lead he would never lose.

A drive through penalty was imposed on Whincup while in prime position to win the Sunday race after RBRA’s car controller was deemed to have undertaken work on his Holden Commodore VF during a pit stop, something that is strictly forbidden.

Whincup then compounded the error by crashing into the Norton Nissan Altima of Michael Caruso, condemning him to a 15th place finish and a 25 point penalty for the ill-judged move.

Dane said some internal restructuring – beyond the much publicised move of Mark Dutton to team manager and Dave Cauchi replacing him as Whincup’s engineer – had contributed to the problems.

Those personnel changes included a new car controller.

“There were some teething problems with moving people around,” Dane confirmed.

“There are a number of different people in different positions; same people but different tasks and we have had a couple of hiccups that we shouldn’t have had. 

“But we are still leading the Championship by a fair amount and we are still leading the Teams’ Championship, so I can’t be too unhappy with it.”

Dane was fired up about Whincup’s drive-through penalty in the race’s immediate aftermath, but quickly tempered his language post-race. 

“I think it was very harsh, but I have moved on,” he said. “I don’t agree with some of those decisions, I don’t agree with some of the methodology about how they are made and I don’t see eye to eye always with the people who are making them.

“But it’s made and it's history to me now.”

The V8 Supercars are next on-track at the 2014 Formula One Rolex Australian Grand Prix.