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Can experience help you sail against the wind?

 Regarding :-

Alex Albon’s theory on why Red Bull F1 juniors struggle at the senior team

Albon has a lot more experience now than in 2019.  Perhaps he would be giving better, more insistent feedback that Tsunoda and Lawson, he would know to get his banker laps in, not to take risks before getting a Q3 car into Q3.


But, beyond that I think he'd struggle as his replacements at RBR have because the team might have a dogmatic problem to overcome.


Reviewing the last rules era, RBR said that their car - RB16B - had become a bit of a "Verstappen special" which was somewhat understandable given they were openly on their third driver to be support for Verstappen who had delivered so much success.  


Recognising this the RB18 was a more neutral car for the new regulation era.  This was a key as on its day the 2022 Ferrari was a faster car - the problem was that it had a narrower set-up window than the RBR which meant the days of peak F1-75 were fewer than peak RB18.


The RBR updates, however, clearly followed an established selection criteria - in that they produced more performance for Verstappen and it was not deemed a crisis that Perez was not able to extract the same pace from.  Perez had all the experience then that Albon has now.  Each subsequent year the pattern was the same - a more neutral car grew narrower in terms of the conditions it required to excel and the gap between the drivers expanded.  Again not a crisis as Verstappen was delivering, but the problem was there.


Perhaps without Perez's influence over this past winter it left the RB21 in the situation it started the season in, peakier and probably getting peakier as the pace is added.


If Perez could not influence the updates to go his way, why would Albon be any more successful?  It's not like RBR don't recognise their design process - they recognised it in 2021, after all.

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