MPH: The Red Bull design trick other F1 teams have missed

F1
- Last updated: January 19th 2024

Red Bull's RB18 was dominant but its next iteration has been even more so. Mark Hughes reveals how the rest of the field have been caught out and recalls another occasion it's been slow in picking up on Adrian Newey's innovations

Max Verstappen 2023 Red Bull

Verstappen has rarely had to look in his rear view mirror this year - his RB19 the class of the field

Red Bull

Mark Hughes

The way that Red Bull’s rivals have been left even further behind in 2023 than was the case last season, the first year of the all-new aero regulations, is counter-intuitive. There was widespread expectation that with Red Bull having shown the optimum solution to the regulations, there would be a lot of copy-cat cars in ’23 and Red Bull would have more competition, not less.

This has all the hallmarks of the competition not having understood what last year’s Red Bull’s real advantage was. They could see where it was great – how it could seem to retain big downforce at low ride heights and high (and thus fast corner and slow) and how it carried less drag for a given level of downforce – but perhaps they all missed how that advantage was being conferred.

Quite a lot of the ’23 cars had Red Bull-looking bodywork and sidepods, but that was only Red Bull’s optimum visible cloaking around its real differentiator – which seems to have been the high-roofed tunnels within the floor in combination with a long-travel rear suspension.

Red-Bull-F1-driver-at-the-2022-US-GP-at-COTA Red Bull’s RB18 was dominant, so why didn’t other teams try to replicate its success?

So while others had been chasing the theoretical biggest total downforce with low-roofed tunnels, maximising the airflow acceleration into the throat of the diffuser – and then finding they couldn’t use it all because of the bouncing phenomenon it triggered – Red Bull was running a higher roof and a lower ride height, facilitated by the longer travel suspension. It’s more complex than just that – the actual geometry of the underfloor is incredibly sophisticated in the way it optimises the various flows – but that seems to be the essence. This allowed downforce akin to the lazy power delivery of a big torquey engine: there all the time from low speeds, always pulling, always accessible, low ride height or high.

From the archive

It seems that McLaren understood this too late to incorporate into its season-starting car, but that it has been moving as far as it can in that direction with its developments. Which would explain its amazing boost in competitiveness of late. Especially as Ferrari and Mercedes do not seem to be on this path.

It’s happened a few times before that teams have been slow on the uptake. Once Lotus had succeeded in creating a ground effect F1 car in 1977, where were all the ground effect 1978 cars? There were only two (the Arrows/Shadow and the Wolf WR5). Once Gordon Murray had introduced a half-tank car, re-introducing planned pit stops part way through 1982, where were all the half-tank 1983 cars? There were some, but by no means all.

It’s happened to Adrian Newey before, as he explained when we interviewed him about his top six cars and he nominated the 1996 Williams FW18:

“We needed a very narrow gearbox. There was a loophole in the regulations where we could effectively take the diffuser over the top of the plank and therefore get more diffuser exit area. But the standard Williams transverse gearbox was too high for that solution. So the ‘95 car came out with that to start with. There was a lot of debate about how we should then do a narrow gearbox. I was pushing for a longitudinal box, Patrick [Head] didn’t like that idea and wanted to do a stepped geared transverse ‘box and that’s one of the very few disagreements we had technically. He prevailed on that – which was his prerogative. So we did this step-up on the transverse, raising it up out the way. That was the 17B which was first raced in Estoril ‘95. It was a very quick car and didn’t win nearly as many races as it should have – through driving mistakes frankly.

Damon Hill in Williams FW18 F1 car

The 1996 Williams FW18: a Newey favourite

Getty Images

“I was worried that over the winter with everyone having seen the pace of the 17B that we’d lose our benefit. But remarkably very few people did – particularly our main rivals Ferrari and McLaren, who missed what we’d done completely.”

It’s not always obvious where the breakthroughs in understanding have been made elsewhere, especially when you are focused flat-out on your own development direction. But for the 2024 cars surely everyone will have woken up and smelt the coffee?

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