Red Bull’s Waché Finds a Silver Lining in Sepang’s 62°C Furnace
While most teams treat Sepang’s heat as an enemy, Red Bull have decided to treat it as a free simulator session. Technical director Pierre Waché called the 33°C air temperature and near-62°C track surface a “learning process” — a rare chance to harvest data from conditions these cars barely ever see. “It was very warm, very difficult for the car and for the tyres… It’s a learning process for the weekend,” he put it bluntly.
The circuit itself added its own chaos to the equation: a patchwork of nine-year-old asphalt and freshly resurfaced sections between Turns 6 and 12, plus dust everywhere, meant grip levels shifted practically every metre. Max Verstappen topped FP1 with a 1:37.520, but deliberately skipped soft-tyre running in FP2 to focus on a long run on mediums — race prep rather than a qualifying statement. Isack Hadjar, second behind Leclerc in the afternoon session, battled brake oscillations that Waché put down to Sepang’s unusual demands: two long straights feeding into heavy braking zones.
Learning process or not, Red Bull clearly prefer that label to admitting they’re chasing.
Source: RacingNews365 (https://racingnews365.com/red-bull-spy-key-opportunity-in-searing-malaysian-heat)
