Team Principal Christian Horner hopes a holistic approach to improving the car’s performance will pay dividends.
“I wouldn’t say the [problems] were exclusive to aero,” he said. “These things always work in tandem. But I think that we made good progress through 2020 and we’ll see whether RB16B has its challenges from the regulation changes, but that’s obviously the same for all teams.
“Hopefully, with a lot of good lessons that we learned last year, we’ll manage to apply those into the updated car.”
Despite appearing to have undergone very minor changes, Red Bull says that it has undergone plenty of development underneath the bodywork.
The new RB16B
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Though Honda is set to pull out of Formula 1 at the end of the 2021 season, the Japanese manufacturer has been working hard over the winter to move up its development plans.
“It is difficult be specific about which parts have seen the most work,” Honda F1 boss Toyoharu Tanabe revealed last week.
“In order to improve power and reliability, we have made modifications to the ICE, turbine and ERS, we have also improved the installation and packaging of the entire PU.”