RB20 details unwittingly leaked by FIA official – With the 2023 season firmly behind us the focus for the world of Formula One is set on the new cars to be unveiled in over six weeks time. Ferrari have already announced the date of the big reveal of their 2024 challenger as 13th April though the Scuderia have not given their new car a name yet.

Still to be decided are the final names for some of the competitors with AlphaTauri presently listed with the FIA as “AlphaTauriRB” and Sauber have the longest name in memory with their “Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber.”

 

 

Red Bull big weight drop for RB19

Mercedes will almost certainly name their car the W15 and are building a completely new car. Gone is the concept and platform that underpinned the less than satisfactory W13/14 as Toto Wolff claimed recently:

“We are changing the concept. We are completely moving away from how we laid out the chassis, the weight distribution, the airflow. I mean, literally, there’s almost every component that’s being changed because only by doing that, I think we have a chance.”

Meanwhile Christian Horner recently revealed that the RB19 was a big carry over from their previous years car. “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,” Horner admits. 

“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.”

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Red Bull philosophy: Evolution

The biggest area of development for the Red Bull 2023 car was the much talked about lightweight chassis. This made the entire RB19 significantly lighter and was rumoured to be operating close to the FIA weight limit of 798kg.

With 10kg making the difference of 0.3 seconds a lap dropping almost 20kg for the car which Red Bull designed for the start of 2022 clearly mad the dominant Rb19 quicker and better handling for Max Verstappen.

Horner now says Red Bull are adopting the same approach for their 2024 car and its, “Evolution not revolution. All areas have been revisited in the car, and we can’t afford to have any complacency.  

“So the car is very much an evolution of a theme. We’re not reinventing the wheel, and that has been very much the route of the engineering path over the last 12 months.”

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Horner claims “no silver bullet”

Since the end of the season there’s been much talk about the law of dismissing returns kicking in next year for the world champion F1 team. Put simply this means Red Bull will find it harder to find new ways to improve their car, whilst the rest of the field have plenty of lower hanging fruit and should close the gap.

Whether he believes this to be the case or not, Christian Horner says: “I’m fully expecting with stable regs and diminishing returns for us because I think we got to the top of the curve quicker than others, the field is going to converge.”

The Red Bull boss believes a number of the teams will converge on his team’s design concepts and is “convinced that you’ll see a lot more cars that perhaps look like an RB19 philosophy.” 

“If you stand still in this business, you tend to be going backwards. And I think that we have got up that curve quicker than others. But we’re into a law of diminishing returns.” 

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FIA official says Red Bull “2024 car is even better”

However former team boss Giancarlo Minardi admits he has heard on the grapevine that Red Bull could in fact be even more dominant next season. Minardi is the president of the FIA’s single seater commission and the FIA are privy to all of the technical details the teams put into their car designs.

New concepts and ideas pushing the boundaries of the regulations are no longer just built and raced in the hope they will be declared legal. Teams negotiate with the FIA to ensure what they are doing will not be ruled illegal by them in the future.

When it was suggested to Minardi that Red Bull will suffer from the law of demising returns, he replied:

“Everyone says yes, that they will be. But I would wait a little bit to say that. They have an advantage that at this moment I think is difficult to bridge. Because analysing the 2023 races well, I’ve gotten the idea that Verstappen has never shown us the best of his ability. And that doesn’t give us much hope. 

“And then from England I get reports that their 2024 car is even better.”

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Mercedes will lack previous data

Evolution is almost always better than revolution in terms of F1 car design but Mercedes have been forced to take the latter route. Having failed to ditch their W13 platform believing it could be improved on the W14 – the former world champions known they must do something radical if they have a hope of winning races and titles once again.

“There’s an opportunity to do a different car, and let’s assume they [Mercedes] do a car as good as Red Bull, I think that Red Bull will still have the advantage, even if the Mercedes is just as good as the Red Bull in every dimension,” said ex Ferrari and Williams manager Peter Windsor on his Youtube stream.

“Red Bull have got this two years of experience of knowing how to run this car in all different variables that come into play in such a long championship, with such a wide range of circuits and conditions and track surfaces, Pirelli tyre compound differences and deg and all that stuff,” Windsor added.

“Red Bull has got all that for the car that they basically have and will continue to have in 2024, whereas Mercedes will effectively, if they do have a Red Bull [level of car], be starting from zero in terms of knowledge of how to run that car.

“So that’s one thing that will make it difficult for Mercedes to beat Red Bull.”

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Singapore demonstrates importance of pre-race simulation

In a recent interview Christian Horner made it crystal calder how important getting the pre-race weekend simulations correlated with the car setup a team begins with during the first practice session.

He cited the Singapore Grand Prix this year, where Red Bull looked all over the place from the get go. This became the only race they failed to win and as Horner explains:

“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,” revealed the Red Bull boss.

“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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McLaren should be closest to RBR

McLaren, Ferrari and even Aston Martin all have last years data to start their car setup with because they each are producing 2024 cars on the ‘evolution’ principle.

Mercedes however will have little of that data as their all new concept and race car platform will behave significantly different from the failed W13/14 cars.

So should Red Bull not have a Newey killer new design, then McLaren look well placed to be the nearest rivals to the Milton Keynes outfit.

Their performance over the final two third of the season would have seen them P2 to Red Bull had they not had the dismal start of 17 points over the first eight rounds.

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