Red Bull’s former chief technical officer Adrian Newey says he was already concerned about the development path of their car before he left them last year.
The team won seven of the first 10 rounds last year but took just two wins over the rest of the season and lost the constructors’ championship to McLaren. Max Verstappen scored all the team’s wins and clinched the drivers’ title while Sergio Perez fell to eighth.
The team announced in May that Newey would leave them at the end of the year. He stopped appearing at races with them soon afterwards.
That coincided with the team’s dip in form, but Newey said he had become concerned about their competitiveness long before then. “Obviously part of it was McLaren in particular and Ferrari as well developing their cars and doing a very good job of their cars,” he told Auto Motor und Sport.
“But I think Red Bull, from what I could see, the ’24 car and through the very last stages of ’23 as well was, I would say, starting to become more difficult to drive.
“Of course Max could handle that. It didn’t suit him, but he could handle it, Checo couldn’t. So we also started, through ’23, to see more of a difference in performance between the team mates, Max and Checo.
“That carried into the first part of ’24, but the car was still quick enough to be able to cope with it. It’s something I was starting to become concerned about, but not many other people in the organisation seemed to be very concerned about it.”
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Newey believes his former colleagues failed to realise they needed to change the development direction of the RB20.
“From what I can see from the outside, but I don’t know, the guys at Red Bull – this is no criticism – I think they just, perhaps through lack of experience, kept going in that same direction. And the problem became more and more acute to the point that even Max found it difficult to drive.”
As Verstappen became more vociferous about the handling problems he was experiencing, Red Bull resorted to set-up tweaks in an attempt to cure it.
“Set-up can mask problems to an extent, but the problem is still there,” said Newey. “To me set-up is more simply optimising the characteristics of the car and of course, to an extent, driver, but I think that’s over-egged.
“It’s mainly to complement the characteristics of the car and then of course circuit-to-circuit variation, depending on the nature of the circuit.”
Most F1 teams suffered setbacks when developing their cars last year. Newey said this is a consequence of the current ‘ground effect’ regulations which allow teams to generate significant downforce by sculpting their cars’ floors but do not allow ‘skirts’ along the edge of the chassis as seen in the late seventies and early eighties.
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“A ground effect car which doesn’t have sealed skirts like the old sliding skirt cars is always going to be very susceptible to aerodynamic instabilities,” he said. “Because you start to generate these very low pressures under the floor but you have all this leakage coming in from the side, and that creates potentially some quite strong losses and problems as you get closer and closer to the ground.
“But equally they are a good way of creating downforce. You’re always trying to trade downforce versus consistency. It’s a difficult problem.”
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