Red Bull pinpoint definitive car change requirement

Helmut Marko has identified what Red Bull must do next season to prevent its car from becoming “unbalanced”, as the RB20 was known for doing.

To the Austrian, the team needs to find a “wider working window” for the RB21 to operate in than its predecessor was afforded.

Unbeknownst to Red Bull at the time, it was developing an increasingly small operating frame into its cars for it to properly work within, something that team principal Christian Horner said was first detected at the 2023 United States Grand Prix.

It proved to be a fatal flaw last year, with the Milton Keynes squad failing to retain the F1 constructors’ championship, falling behind McLaren and Ferrari over the course of the campaign.

“This car needs a wider working window so that it doesn’t immediately become unbalanced when there are slight temperature fluctuations or minor technical changes,” Marko wrote in his column for Speedweek. 

“That’s exactly what our engineers are working on.”

Ground effects and downforce

The contemporary ground effects era in F1 mandates that not only must a team successfully add downforce to its car to improve, it must also maintain harmony between the ground effect beneath the floor and more traditional aerodynamics.

If it cannot, the car becomes unbalanced and costs lap time, even if points of downforce have been added.

Red Bull is not the only team to grapple with this particular issue and the concept of developing backwards. Ferrari had to unwind it’s Spanish Grand Prix upgrade earlier in the year and Aston Martin has become less and less competitive through updates over the past 18 months.

Mercedes, meanwhile, has so far failed to truly grasp the complex relationship between the two prevailing forces, leaving its cars inconsistent and unpredictable.

Outlining how much Red Bull has found in downforce, Marko highlighted how that does not necessarily marry to the conventional amount of lap time any more.

“40 points of downforce is good, but four tenths on the stop watch is what interests me and the driver,” the 81-year-old added.

“The handling must be predictable for the driver so that he can build up the necessary confidence.”