Photo Credit: Red Bull Content Pool
The 2023 season for Red Bull and Max Verstappen was nothing short of extraordinary, characterized by unprecedented dominance in the history of F1, with 19 victories achieved out of 22 races played for the Dutchman and 21 out of 22 for the team.
Not only that, since the year marked by fire for the driver from Hasselt was also sublimated by the other successes. If he had been only racing himself for Red Bull, he would have won them the constructors’ Championship as well. Ultimately the Red Bull pair delivered their second consecutive constructors’ championship, and it was the sixth overall for the Milton Keynes-based squad.
With the current technical stability, Red Bull still are expected to have a significant advantage over the competition and. The driver from the Netherlands will start from Bahrain as the clear favorite to bag a fourth straight world title.
Red Bull is absolutely intent on maintaining their advantage, having the designers and engineers set the 2024 project with the aim of extracting all the margin for improvement of the RB19 to create a car even faster than the 2023 one.
Te RB20, which according to the words of the technicians from Milton Keynes, would have already achieved most of the project objectives and eliminated what (even if it might seem strange) were the weak points of the RB19 which, in the 22 races; several times it proved to be less than comfortable in some scenarios, as happened in Singapore.
They hope those deficiencies will be filled by the RB20, at least according to what Ben Waterhouse, head of performance engineering at Red Bull, declared in an interview with Racecar Engineering.
“We were aware that the RB19 had considerable limitations.
“If we look back at Singapore, there were definitely weaknesses. There are areas we want to improve, whether it’s high-speed or low-speed performance. At the same time, [the car] had clear strengths, which we want to build on while at the same time trying to address the weaknesses.”
It’s something Verstappen referenced as well in an interview with Motorsport Network.
“Mainly I think just street circuits and low-speed, kerbing.
“These kind of things, I think we are not the best at the moment.”
Weak points of the RB19 which have been identified and resolved, while the strong points of Verstappen and Perez’s car have been maintained and indeed accentuated, such as aerodynamic efficiency, in an attempt to make the Red Bull almost unbeatable on high-speed tracks like Jeddah, Spa Francorchamps and Silverstone.
