The competition forced Red Bull to take an aggressive design path, claims Pierre Wache

Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache insists that the Milton Keynes-based outfit has been forced by its rivals to take an aggressive development path for 2024.

Red Bull enjoyed a strong start to its 2024 F1 title defence, winning four of the opening five rounds. It initially looked like that the Milton Keynes-based outfit would dominate the third year of the current era of ground-effect cars until McLaren and Ferrari achieved a sudden lift in performance.

The Scuderia won in Australia and then in Monaco while the British squad took the victory in Miami. Following a successful upgrade in Monaco, Mercedes also started to claw its way back to the sharp end of the field. So impressive was the step the Brackley-headquartered outfit took that it won three of the last four races before the summer break.

The Austro-British outfit has made significant changes to its last year’s car, the RB19 which dominated proceedings for the majority of the season. Initially, it was unclear what prompted Red Bull to revise the entire cooling configuration of its 2023 F1 car given their competitive advantage, but the team later revealed that they had feared from the rival outfits to close in on as the stable technical regulations had led to convergence.

Similar to the last two years, the RB20 has excelled with its aerodynamic efficiency on straights and medium-slow corners, but has lagged in certain sections compared to its three main rivals, McLaren, Mercedes and Ferrari.

Explaining the aggressive design approach, Red Bull’s technical director Pierre Wache insisted that the reigning world champion team wanted to establish a platform they could build further upgrades on.

“We assumed the competition would catch up quickly that’s why we wanted to use the advantage to take the concept a step further in order to optimise the aerodynamics. We took some risks here, now it looks it hasn’t paid off as we had hoped.”

“But this risk was necessary. We have the oldest wind tunnel in the entire field, detailed work suffers as a result. It was foreseeable that the others would optimise their concepts sooner or later.

“That’s why we needed to take a radical step. We are not afraid to take risks, whether in the factory, at the racetrack or in terms of strategy. That is the mentality of this team.

“I can’t judge whether it was a good or bad move yet. At the moment, thanks to the good start to the season, it is helping us to lead the championships.

“Perhaps at the end of the year we will come to the conclusion whether we had further develop the concept better,” Wache was quoted as saying by German publication AMUS.