Red Bull flies to first win

Adrian Newey became a Grand Prix winner with a fourth F1 team when Sebastian Vettel led home Red Bull Racing team-mate Mark Webber in China. Newey had previously tasted success with Williams, McLaren and Toro Rosso, and once came very close with Leyton House.

Although the win was rightly flagged as the first for RBR, many of the team’s members were present when it won as Stewart GP at the Nürburgring in 1999.

The pace of the RB5 has been impressive, particularly in light of the fact that the team did not follow the double diffuser route, and thus has comfortably outperformed the likes of Ferrari and McLaren on a level playing field. It is interesting to note that the car was launched three weeks after some of its rivals, Newey having decided to spend that priceless extra time on R&D before signing off a launch spec.

Although the Brawn BGP001 clearly has an edge in the dry, the RB5 has outperformed it in the rain. The team insists that Webber could have beaten Jenson Button in Malaysia had the race not been stopped prematurely, and in China Button could not keep up with the blue cars, which were more effective at maintaining temperature in their tyres in the tricky conditions.