Red Bull has just unveiled their new cockpit canopy protection design ahead of its inaugural run in the first Russian GP free practice session.
The design itself is called ‘Aeroscreen’ and has already been fitted to Daniel Ricciardo’s RB12 in preparation for its track debut on Friday.
“In FP1 I will do an installation lap with it,” said the Aussie driver on Thursday. “I’m sure I will get a lot of TV time in the first two minutes of the session!”
As reported by Autosport, Williams driver Felipe Massa already stated that “it will be nice to see how it looks and how it is for the drivers.” Of course, Massa has more of a personal stake in this type of protection after having suffered a head injury back in 2009 at the Hungaroring.
When the Brazilian was asked if he preferred Red Bull’s design over Ferrari’s Halo concept, he simply stated “I don’t know, I have no idea. We’ll see how it looks tomorrow [on track].”
Somebody who does have a strong opinion about the Aeroscreen is none other than reigning F1 champion Lewis Hamilton to lamented that the screen looks like a riot shield.
“If they’re going to do this, close the cockpit like a fighter jet,” said Hamilton. “Don’t half-arse it. Go one way or the other. That screen looks so bad. It looks like a bloody riot shield. You’ve got this cool, elegant futuristic Formula 1 car, and you’ve got a riot shield sitting on top of it.”
“And the other one [halo], the carbon fiber structure was obviously good but Fernando wouldn’t have been able to get out of the car potentially in his crash in Melbourne,” added the British driver.
Sounds like Lewis isn’t too impressed with any of these designs.
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