MPH: The critical Red Bull flaw – with no Newey to fix it

F1

Red Bull finds itself with an overly complex 2024 F1 car that even Max Verstappen can't overcome – does it turn back, or risk going into a development dead end?

2 Max Verstappen Red Bull 2024 Italian GP

Lack of a stable rear end is at root of Red Bull issues

Mark Hughes

Literally almost to the day that Adrian Newey left Red Bull’s technical group (it was on the Friday of the Miami GP) the team has experienced difficulties with its car. Difficulties which have cascaded to the point where at Monza last weekend it was only the fourth-fastest, leaving Max Verstappen to trail home sixth, 37sec behind Charles Leclerc’s winning Ferrari.

Although Newey – who is widely expected to be announced at Aston Martin in the coming days – remains officially in Red Bull’s employ until March, from that day in Miami he has been decoupled from the team’s technical group and has focused on selling the remaining production run of his Red Bull RB17 Hypercar.

There is no way on earth that one man walking out the door impacts immediately on the performance of a car. Furthermore, as we showed here a few weeks ago, its raw pace over a qualifying lap has not significantly changed since the start of the year when it was winning races with ease. Its biggest problem has been the big step-like increase in performance by the McLaren (from its Miami upgrade) and Mercedes (from its Monaco/Canada upgrade). As always, it’s about relative performance. But even aside from that, Verstappen has suffered increasing difficulties with the car’s race day balance as it has been developed. Something in the aerodynamic development of the car has been missed. The aero load has increased, just as the tunnel said it would, but the balance has been destroyed, something the simulation did not pick up.

Max Verstappen chasing Lando Norris

As McLaren and others have developed to push Red Bull, so its car’s weaknesses have been exposed

This is where the left-field thinking of Newey might have been so valuable in identifying and course-correcting. He’s an engineer first and foremost, but not one whose thoughts are constrained by the boxes of the discipline.

The car’s problem is manifest at the track with a rear end that Verstappen cannot lean hard upon on corner entry. To compensate, they often have to run the car with more rear wing than ideal, obliterating one of its core strengths of aero efficiency. That at least usually gives Verstappen enough of a balance over one lap that he can pull a quick time from it (he was fastest in qualifying by a big margin as recently as Spa), but gives him understeer in the race as the front tyres degrade. Slow on the straights and an understeer balance is so far from the traditional Red Bull. Monza, where there’s only so far you can go with increasing the rear wing level, punished the problem more severely.

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“It’s a characteristic that’s been there for some time,” said Christian Horner at Monza. “Going through the data it was there at the beginning of the year even when we were winning by 20sec. Others have made a step and as we’ve pushed the package harder in response it’s exposed the issue. Even if you go back to a few races late last year, such as in Austin, the seeds of it were there… If you look at the McLaren it’s a fairly straight evolution of their ’23 car, a much simpler car than ours.” The RB20’s complexity seems to have caught the team out as it has tried to develop it.

As things stand McLaren is on course to catch and pull away from Red Bull in the constructors’ championship and even Verstappen’s big lead in the drivers’ championship is under threat. Under these stressed circumstances Red Bull is presented with the choice of continuing to plug away at unearthing where something is being lost between tunnel and track – or reverting wholesale to the car’s early-season spec. But doing the latter is not as simple as it might sound.

There have been so many changes – front wing, nose, floor body, floor edges, sidepod/engine cover (twice), rear wing, beam wing, brake ducts – that have all been developed together. Where the car is now is a million miles from where it was. Re-creating the original spec would be a massive programme for the production department within the timescale. Plus, there’s probably a reluctance to make such an admission of defeat rather than identifying and correcting the current car.

Max Verstappen Red Bull 2024 Italian GP

Can the team find a relatively quick fix for Verstappen?

Red Bull

Horner’s statement in Monza suggests he doesn’t want to revert. “First of all you’ve got to understand the problem and understand how to address it and then implement it. So there’ll be an engineering solution to an engineering problem.”

His lead driver might not agree that’s the best course of action…

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