Having been inside a Formula One team that dominated the constructors’ championship for eight consecutive seasons (2014-21), Lewis Hamilton knows what makes a winning F1 outfit. Last summer he complained that the advantage that Red Bull Racing have meant the could stop work on the RB19 much earlier than the rest of the field and look towards this year’s car.

It appears the Milton Keynes based squad did a decent job as they produced a more radical evolution of last years car at the pre-season testing in Bahrain. Mercedes followed a similar path with Toto Wolff declaring last time in Abu Dhabi that, “We are changing the concept,” he told Motorsport.com.

 

 

 

Red Bull surprise new 2024 car 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”, said the Mercedes boss.

Having had a poor start to the season, Mercedes lie fourth in the championship and Lewis Hamilton is just ninth in the drivers’ title race having score just eight points in two races. Despite the years of data from each circuit, Mercedes are struggling to decide how best their W15 works.

In Jeddah when he should have been refining his setup for qualifying, Hamilton bolted on a completely different rear wing for price three, as he tried to make the balance of the car more to his liking.

Red Bull meanwhile have two 1/2 finishes this season to date and in the hands of Max Verstappen it looks as though the all new RB20 will prove as difficult for the rest to beat as did the RB19. Paul Monaghan, the team’s chief engineer speaking to motorsport.com claims the big change in this year’s car was to keep providing scope for further performance to be unlocked on this current cycle of the FIA F1 car design regulations.

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Red Bull looking to 2026

“If we choose to make some bigger changes on the car it opens up more options for us,” he said. “That’s part of our reason to say ‘let’s go ahead and change it more fully’.

“It’s probably the last big roll of the dice because into 2025 you have to be looking at the 2026 car.”

As Hamilton observed last year, Red Bull have so much performance in hand they are already looking at next year’s project.“You will see quite early on in terms of aerodynamic research if we are bumping into some limits,” said Monaghan. “At that point you have to say ‘okay, can we look at it differently and what do we need to change?’

Red Bull according to their chief engineer are already considering any “unlocked ergometry that shows some promise, but we can’t get on to this year’s car? You’ll start to see that probably now.”

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Big changes could be seen next year too

“Any bigger change for next season has to be “viable, realistic, financially achievable and do we have the resources to do it? That we’ll find out,” said the Red Bull senior manager.

As if the competition aren’t concerned enough, Monaghan goes on to claim that they believe the gains are coming soon. “Magnitude wise at the moment we can find similar gains to last year. I suspect towards the end of the year it may well diminish a bit, but we’ve got some brilliantly creative people and if they find it, then we’ll take it. It’s as simple as that.”

So if Hamilton is right, Red Bull will decide in the coming weeks only on whether the design for 2025 will be an evolution of the RB20 or whether they can get better performance from a more radical evolution again.

What will come into play soon is the 2026 regulations. The FIA have mandated for new versions of the V6 Turbo engines currently used, though they will have more input from the electrical component of the power unit and will run completely on bio fuel.

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FIA ban early start on 2026 car designs

In terms of the chassis design, F1’s governing body has not yet settled on the exact specifications, though each team is involved in an ongoing FIA working party to agree the rules for 2026. So the general direction the aerodynamics will be taking is being fleshed out at present so team could take a punt on how the final regulations will be written.

To stop what Hamilton complains to be an unfair advantage, the FIA have mandated now work can be done on the 2026 chase before January 1st 2025. That said Red Bull are handicapped now as champions with less aerodynamic testing time this year than the others. The handicap system allows more time for trials the lower down the table the team finished in the constructors’ competition.

The FIA rules for the 2026 chassis forbid “using car geometry partially or wholly compliant with and/or substantially derived from drafts and/or published versions of the 2026 F1 Technical Regulations or FIA proposed 2026 bodywork geometries and concepts” for either wind tunnel or CFD testing.

Scott Mitchel-Malm of the race claims: “The lack of a set of published technical regulations [for 2026] would not necessarily stop teams working on their cars either now or next year without the ban in place, though.

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Loopholes to FIA regulations

“There could be draft versions in circulation in private, which is why the regulations make a point of outlawing more than just working on cars that are defined by published technical regulations.”

Each team will have a small working group set up and looking ahead to 2026 and all work by them is allowed so long as it doesn’t make it to the wind tunnel or CFD stage.

This regulation does not go as far as Hamilton demanded, with a date of August cited by the seven times world champion. Yet for most teams even January 1st 2025 will be an uphill struggle as they will be looking towards the in season upgrades required for next year.

However, if Red Bull can retain their current 1 second per lap advantage over the field in Grand Prix racing, it will be the teams at Milton Keynes who are building and analysing models for 2026 far earlier than the rest of Formula One. The 2026 regulations are meant to be finalised in June this year.

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Jos Verstappen U-Turn on his Horner accusation

The Red Bull saga dominated pre-season testing but it looked as though the organisation had wrapped up the matter before the Bahrain Grand Prix. Having concluded an investigation into an accusation against Christian Horner and dismissing the complaint, the matter reared its head as an anonymous email dropped into 149 inboxes of senior paddock F1 folk.

The email contained alleged documents from the investigation which appeared to cast the Red Bull team boss in a poor light. The Austrian based company is now conducting another internal investigation to find the source of the so called ‘leak.’…READ MORE