How a botched 2023 upgrade is now destroying Red Bull’s 2024 hopes
Following the Azerbaijan GP, comments from Red Bull boss Christian Horner caused a bit of a stir as he declared that the team could trace its current performance issues back to the floor upgrade it introduced at the 2023 Spanish Grand Prix – on its dominant RB19.
It is an unusually strong statement in that it indicates how development issues have overlapped with long-standing problems in the concept.
It is difficult to consider in detail the conclusions reached by the engineers in Milton Keynes, although RacingNews365 understands from well-placed sources that the problem has grown from a single aerodynamic issue to an increasingly complex one: namely the interaction between the vehicle dynamics and the aerodynamics themselves.
At the 2023 Spanish GP, the RB19 adopted an evolution of the floor which at the time seemed minor with tweaks being made to the air-flow diverters and the volume of the Venturi channels.
At the time, this did not cause concern among the engineers, precisely because the performance of the car, in Max Verstappen’s hands at least, had remained practically unchanged, as he headed to one of 19 grand prix wins across the season.
Retrospectively, analysing the difficulties Sergio Perez has endured since Barcelona 2023, it raises the possibility of him struggling with the overall development direction as opposed to a single upgrade.
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Problems hidden rear Red Bull head
Such upgrades include the increase in the size of the undercut between the sidepods and floor that increased between the 2023 Azerbaijan and Hungarian GPs.
The idea was to increase the flow of a third stream of air towards the rear of the car, but this did not interact well with the floor evolution introduced in Spain – with further upgrades coming to the edges of the floor at the British GP – again won by Verstappen.
In essence, the effect of those changes was to increase the sensitivity of the car to fluctuations in ride heights, which was the basis of the terrible race in Singapore – the only race Red Bull did not win in 2023.
At Marina Bay, Red Bull brought a version of the floor that was not used, but introduced next time out in Japan, where it returned to competitiveness with a dominant Verstappen win.
In reality, the modifications brought to the floor radicalised the behaviour of the car, which at the time seemed to be only managed by Verstappen.
In hindsight, it could be said that Perez’s problems with both the RB19 and RB20 were and are a litmus test that the Red Bull engineers dismissed as revealing a serious problem with the car.
Only when Verstappen in mid-2024 began to repeatedly complain about the behaviour of the car did an alarm bell ring and an in-depth analysis of the problems take place.
In Baku 2024, a new floor was equipped, likely to be used again in Singapore this weekend, with a fresh design in the works for the United States Grand Prix at Austin in October.
This new floor did improve the car, but not well enough to firmly declare that the problems have been solved, with the issue being the time required to correct the direction of project which was ultimately born with rather precise technical beliefs that turned out to be wrong.
The world titles of 2024 are now at stake, with the constructors’ seemingly destined for McLaren and Verstappen’s drivers’ crown also decidedly not safe.
