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

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.

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.