Red Bull Comfortable with Toro Rosso Penalty Risks

Published 07/16/2018, 8:49 PM EDT

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Earlier it had been reported that Brendon Hartley appeared to be serving as a test dummy for Toro Rosso and Red Bull.

This was in the wake of the overnight decision to change the entire power unit on the New Zealander’s car for Austria. So, for the second successive weekend Hartley incurred a full 35-place grid penalty hit.

At Silverstone the Kiwi crashed heavily due to a front suspension failure automatically eliminating him from qualifying. For safety reasons, the FIA ordered Toro Rosso to change the entire front suspension on teammate Pierre Gasly‘s car.

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Since the Faenza outfit failed to score a single point since Monaco, they slipped to eighth in the standings. The only table the team is leading is that of power unit components. Hartley is now on his fifth internal combustion engine, turbocharger and MGU-H, and Gasly on his fourth.

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With Red Bull now having jumped ship to Honda, it seems that things are likely to get a whole lot worse. Especially since Red Bull has given the all-clear for Honda to test its upgrades whenever they are ready to run no matter how many more penalties it results in.

“Of course we leave the decision to Honda,” Helmut Marko. “But if they find a tenth with the development, of course, they can try the upgrade in the race… even if that means we’re taking penalties for it.”

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While the idea of the Italian team being used as the test lab for Red Bull will frustrate Gasly and Hartley. But it makes sense for the Austrian team who will want to hit the ground running in 2019, even if it means sister team taking the pain this year.

However, 2019 is still sometime away and Red Bull will have to see out their tenure with Renault before adopting Honda engines.

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Written by:

Dhruv George

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Dhruv George is a senior Formula One and NASCAR analyst for EssentiallySports, having authored nearly 12000 articles spanning different sports like F1, NASCAR, Tennis, NFL, and eSports. He graduated with a PG Diploma in Journalism from the Xavier Institute of Communications. Dhruv has also conducted interviews with F1 driver Pierre Gasly and Moto2 rider Tony Arbolino.
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