Formula One teams are infamous for closely guarding their secrets. Even if they can hide a new element on the car for a handful of races before the competition understand what they have done, this could be the difference between winning and losing a title. Red Bull Racing have proven to be one of the best in the paddock at finding a ‘silver bullet’, but even more clever is their ability to allow claim and counter claim of their ‘secrets’ to whirl around the F1 world and sow confusion as to exactly what they are doing.

Yet now and again someone slips up. Sergio Perez crashed in Monaco on lap 1 of qualifying and the notorious skyscraper cranes used in the principality gave everyone a view of their supposed ‘top secret’ underfloor design which allows them to run their car flat and create ore downforce than the rest of the field. However, now and again it is a senior team member of a driver who lets slip what the team is up to and despite their extensive media training they say a little too much allowing others to piece together a piece of their technical jigsaw.

 

 

 

Verstappen leaks ‘new chassis’

“We are getting a new chassis in the future,” said Max Verstappen said in Belgium 2022. “I don’t know how much lighter it will be, but if it works, it will help us.” Despite Hamilton being on pole and Verstappen starting P14, the dutch champion seared through the field to claim yet another ‘easy’ looking victory.

When pressed on the revelation by Max that Red Bull had a new lightweight chassis, Christian Horner dismissed this out of hand.  “No, we didn’t bring it and no, we don’t have one,” said Horner. But the lightweight chassis rumour had the paddock murmuring and Ferrari team boss Mattia Binotto expressed concern over the legality of such an upgrade given the cost cap restraint now placed upon the teams.

“We could never afford to develop a lightweight chassis – or any other chassis – during the season because the budget doesn’t allow it,” said the Italian.

“I would be very surprised if that were possible for other teams. You have to ask yourself whether the monitoring is sufficient. Unfortunately, very few people keep an eye on it at the FIA.

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Ferrari question Red Bull spending

“That needs to improve for the future. It would be really bad if the championship were decided by the financial rules,” Binotto insisted.

Yet the FIA race documentation issued during each F1 weekend never included the new chassis in 2022 which led to speculation it was held back until the RB19 was produced.

Reviewing the progress Red Bull made between ’22 and ’23, Sky F1 reporter Ted Kravitz identified amongst other items that “Unlike last year’s RB18, the RB19 is a lightweight chassis. The lighter your car is, the faster you will go,” explains Kravitz.

He went on to suggest that Red Bull’s silver bullet meant the RB19 was operating close to the minimum 798kg limit regulated by the FIA.

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RB19 aerodynamic efficiency

Without knowing the weight of the other F1 cars, its difficult to understand the implications in terms of time advantage Red Bull achieved during the 2023 season. Weight is key to lap times with the regularly stated 10kg of fuel differential creating a 0.3 second a lap advantage.

There were other factors which fed into the dominance experienced by Max Verstappen and one was the straight line speed of his car especially when using the DRS.

Whilst Verstappen was mostly at the head of the field in races, the DRS is used in qualifying which helped Verstappen to his 12 pole positions of the year.

“The RB19 was born slippery. Unlike the Aston Martin or the Mercedes for example, the Red Bull’s aerodynamic design has very low underlying drag,” Kravitz added.

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Red Bull better at ‘ground effect’

Further in the new era of ground effect design F1 cars, the downforce created under the car is far more important than than from the traditional wings/winglets and other aero devices on top of the car.

“Red Bull are able to run their floor flat and low to the track which gives the car immense useable downforce across the speed range,” said Kravitz. “This also means that the car can keep its tyres in great shape.”

Now asked by motorsport.com if the team understood why their car was so dominion, Christian Horner appears to reveal the big secret behind their 2023 car.

“What you have to remember is that with the RB19, there were a large number of components that came from the RB18: gearbox, a large percentage of the suspension, and half of the chassis. It was effectively a cut-and-shut for this year.

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Weight advantage up to 0.6 seconds a lap

“The most significant thing that we were able to address was the weight. We were so late going on to the new regs in 2021, because of that championship battle that the car in 2022 was a bit on the chunky side.

“So, we managed to get 20 kilos out of the car coming into this year, and tidy up some of the imperfections,” Horner revealed.

This is an astonishing claim given that 20kg of weight reduction will improve the lap time by around 0.6 seconds. Throughout the year, this was the average race pace advantage Verstappen had when leading from the front.

Yet Horner suggests other ares of the car which were carried over were also part of the RB19’s winning combination.

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Red Bull affectedly 2021 Hamilton battle

“But there were a great many carryover parts and some of the components have actually won, in Max’s case, 19 races this year and 15 last year, so the combination of the two: 34 races.” 

“It was a little bit everywhere,” he said. “It was not one specific area that you could take the weight off. It was just marginal gains in all areas.”

Despite this Horner appears to believe the weight reduction factor was the biggest contributor to their success: “I think that was probably the fundamental difference between the 2022 car and the 2023 car.”

Given the titanic battle between Mac Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton over the closing races in 2021, Red Bull had less time to develop the RB18 and Horner suggests this hampered their progress during the early season as the Ferrarinin the hands of Charles Leclerc mounted a serious challenge.

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Singapore threw Red Bull

“Yeah. We were carrying that deficit [20kg] for a large percentage of the year,” Horner openly admits suggesting Verstappen’s fifteen wins in 2022 could have been more.

The surprise of 2023 was when the teams arrived in Singapore. Red Bull were off the pace and in qualifying Max failed to make it into Q3. Horner now reveals the factors which prevented Red Bull taking a clean sweep and winning all 24 races, as a canny Carlos Sainz peeked out the win in the city state night race.

“I think that that race just brings everything into reality, that I think quite often we made winning look easy this year,” noted Horner. “Winning is never easy.

“I think that race just bought it home that if you miss the target, it’s small margins. Set-up wise, we arrived with a set-up that our simulation tools led us down the route of, and it just didn’t work on that circuit, on that day, particularly in qualifying.

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FIA delegate leaks RB 2024 details

“In the race the pace started to come back to us. But I think if we’d have known what we knew after the event going into the event, we would have been in a much more competitive position.”

Were Red Bull to have had a significant advantage weight wise this year, this should give hope to the rest of the field given trimming down the weight of a car is a relatively simple process compared to redesigning the suspension geometry.

However, the president of the FIA single seater commission revealed this week that Red Bull have a whole new bag of tricks up their sleeve for the coming year and cautioned certain media personalities from claiming the laws of diminishing returns should see the rest of teams closer to the world champions.

Of course Christian Horner isn’t going to give the trade secrets away, and the rest of the competition should know the weight at which the RB19 finished each Grand Prix this year. So it could be FIA delegate and former team boss Giancarlo Minardi has a point and Ferrari, Mercedes. Aston Martin and McLaren will be chasing shadows in 2024 once again.

READ MORE: FIA delegate shares ‘leak’ about Red Bull 2024 car