Red Bull Racing is gearing up for the 2024 Formula 1 season with an ambitious approach for their RB20 car.
Coming off a dominant 2023 season where they won nearly all races, the team is working to maintain or even strengthen their leading position. Italian reports suggest that Red Bull aims to “annihilate” the competition by pushing their existing ideas to an extreme level, essentially crafting a radically different concept from their 2023 car, the RB19.
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Chief Engineer Paul Monaghan emphasised that the RB20 would be an evolution of the RB19, albeit with significant enhancements. This evolution is vital as other teams like McLaren, Ferrari, and Mercedes are closing the gap. The development strategy involves refining the current car’s concept rather than completely discarding it, with a focus on gaining more lap time to stay ahead of the competition.
According to Motorsport.com, he said: “It would be wrong of us to just leave it alone because our opposition is getting a bit closer.
“But the rules are quite tight compared to what we’ve had in previous years and with previous generations of car, where we could do a little bit more and move things around.
“It perhaps wouldn’t surprise you if I said it will be an evolution of the current car, as it will be a bit foolish to throw this concept away.
“But equally, we’ve got to make some progress. We’ve got to find some lap time. The opposition is on us and if they do a step, then we’d better have a bigger step.
“But [the RB20] carries over a lot of the lessons and benefits of the current car, and then from Bahrain next year, we’ll see whether we’ve done a good enough job.”
The team’s development was previously constrained due to a penalty involving a 10% reduction in wind tunnel and CFD time for breaching the 2021 cost cap. However, having served this penalty, Red Bull is now able to fully engage in the development of the RB20. Monaghan believes that the enforced efficiency during the penalty period will have long-term benefits, leading to more effective use of their R&D resources.
He explained: “It forced us to look again at the efficiency with which we do tests in the wind tunnel environment and in CFD. And whilst everybody has a restriction, everybody wants the efficiency, so that caused us to make some small improvements.
“I don’t think they will be revolutionary, but any of those refinements we will keep as our benefit because, as we get a few more morsels of testing, then we use those morsels more efficiently.”
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