Mark Webber concedes it will be difficult for Red Bull, or any other team, to establish a clear advantage at the front of the field given the current competitiveness of the grid.
With Red Bull realistically requiring a series of wins and podium finishes over the final five races of the season to have a chance of overhauling Brawn in both world championship battles, the team needs to repeat the sort of superiority it enjoyed in mid-season when it scored consecutive 1-2s at Silverstone and the Nurburgring.
However, following summer resurgences from both McLaren and Ferrari, the previous round at Spa saw Force India, BMW and Toyota all muscle in on front-running positions.
And with the prospect of more unpredictability this weekend at Monza due to the unknown size of the advantage cars with KERS will have and the introduction of untried one-off low downforce packages, Webber admits the two title-challenging teams are no longer the clear leaders of the pack.
“It’s going to be interesting to see how the KERS cars go around here,” he told reporters on Thursday.
“We certainly need to be doing a good job when we’re not on the throttle that’s for sure; when we’re off the throttle we need to be doing a very, very good job.
“Also, new aero packages for everyone so we need to see how they all roll out.
“It’s not about Brawn and Red Bull anymore – there are more guys now arriving.
“What we saw at the start of the year [with Brawn], what we saw in the middle of the year with us, now it’s just…you saw it in Spa with my drive-through I copped 15-20s [of lost time] and ‘bang’ I’m out of the points.
“Now it’s changed.”
Webber concedes RBR can’t expect to be setting the clear pace at the high-speed venue, but is nevertheless confident it will be among the front-runners.
“The thick end of the field is at the front and it seems to be very difficult to get a clear advantage now and I certainly don’t expect us to have that this weekend,” he added.
“I expect us to be in the hunt right there, but to have a clear advantage would be, I think, a bit optimistic.”
With the in-season testing ban have ensured no teams have had a chance to test their Monza downforce packages at the Italian circuit this year, Webber says Friday practice will be particularly challenging for both drivers and teams.
“I think it just depends on how much effort people have put into their low-downforce package,” the Australian said.
“Normally we used to come here with a track that was full of rubber after a full week’s testing and now we will go out tomorrow with a track that’s pretty green.
“So it is going to have its own little challenges tomorrow to get our head round.
“Us as drivers, we don’t go 340kph all the time so you normally spend your first run just recalibrating yourself, getting yourself ready for the long straights, car moving around a lot.
“So it is going to be an interesting day tomorrow to lay the platform for where teams are going to be for Q3.”
Team-mate and fellow title contender Sebastian Vettel, meanwhile, is also keen to see just how big an advantage the KERS power boost will provide teams around the fastest circuit on the calendar.
Renault has joined KERS regulars McLaren and Ferrari in running the energy-storage devices this weekend, with the latter two in particular expected to perform strongly.
“It’s not easy,” Vettel said about the prospect of trying to overtake KERS cars at Monza.
“Overtaking the KERS cars has never been easy this year and I think obviously in a place where you have more straight lines than anywhere else doesn’t make it easier.
“How big the effect KERS will be we will know in lap time tomorrow, roughly.
“Again, with no testing or experience on this circuit we don’t know – but either we have a good surprise or a bad surprise tomorrow.
“I think that’s the same message for all the KERS cars.”
Nevertheless the 22-year-old German, 19 points behind points leader Jenson Button, is optimistic for the weekend as he says the RB5 has generally been a competitive force on all types of circuit.
“Overall, I don’t remember any place where we were struggling really with pace,” he said.
“Even though sometimes we were not able to win the race, I think we still had very good pace to finish third, fourth, fifth and not much worse than that.
“I know we did not always do the best job in finishing the races, but I think there is nothing that speaks against us and against the fact that we will have a strong pace here.
“If it [the car] is good enough to win obviously we have to win.
“In Spa we did not, but nevertheless I think we did everything we could on Sunday and Saturday probably was not as good as we wanted it to be and we had a bad surprise like many people.
“But that’s life and here we will see, it’s a pretty different circuit – yes, it’s also higher speeds – but you don’t have those high-speed corners like in Spa so we will see.”
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