Even by Adrian Newey’s high standards, Red Bull’s RB19 Formula 1 car was a stunning success.
Breaking records as Max Verstappen waltzed to 19 grand prix wins in a single season in the second year of the ‘level effect’ regulations was not what most people would have called it a year ago.
After Red Bull won all but five GPs in 2022, the natural assumption was that the second year of these tunnel-floored cars would see their advantage erode.
Well, pretty much everyone made progress. Red Bull just did more.
Only a few teams had begun to understand the fundamentals of what made the ’22 Red Bull dominant. This little detail is the heart of the ’23 car’s increased advantage, as it took the basic foundation that was so right – and added forever more downforce to it. The correctness of this idea in ’22 had to do with Newey.
He feeds into the technical team, also including technical director Pierre Wache and head of aeronautics Enrico Balbo. But he will tell you that he never directs this group of gifted people, he would never say “let’s go from here, follow me”.
But he seems to have an intuitive understanding of the hierarchy of importance of performance factors, especially when a new set of regulations comes into effect and shuffles all those variables. Historically, that’s where he gets the jump on everyone else.
So when these 2022 regulations were put in place, his overview of how these floors were supposed to work in conjunction with the suspension would be a guiding principle. The suspension was no longer merely subordinate to aerodynamics, but absolutely inherent in it.
To this end, he designed the RB18’s front and rear suspensions himself. It gave extremely tight platform control (with very little pitch or dive), allowing the car to run softer rear suspension than others – which, combined with a much more sympathetic floor contour, gave that ever-strong bounce-free delivery under power.
What set the RB18 apart was how it could deliver good, consistent downforce at all ride heights, yaw, pitch and roll conditions, etc. – without ever being bothered by seals or bounces. It wasn’t about his peak downforce (which wasn’t remarkable), but the spread of usable downforce (which was).
Newey’s way of visualizing the multidimensional aspects of overall performance was written into the very DNA of the RB18. The RB19 piled the downforce on this perfect platform. That’s why he was even further from the chase.
When we caught up with the man himself near the end of the season, we asked if this – his most statistically dominant car to date – gave him the most satisfaction.
“I don’t know, really,” Newey smiled. “It’s a bit shallow if you just base it on results. I have seen many different eras.
“Go back to the ’90s with the active car, really pushing a new technology to its limit, especially the ’93 car. ’92 the first time I was in a car that won the championship [the Williams FW14B]. Then the end of the 90s, grooved tyres, my move to McLaren, it was quite satisfying to show that I could be in a different team and get results.
“Red Bull’s first championship in 2010, having come so close in ’09, was good. In ’10 we probably had as much of a performance advantage as this year, but we didn’t have the reliability.
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“The biggest thing is the change in technology and regulations. The 90s, at the time, those rules seemed very restrictive but they were incredibly open compared to now. But we didn’t have the team size.
“Most importantly, we didn’t have the simulation tools to give us the level of understanding we have now.
“The wind tunnels themselves haven’t changed that much. Yes, we use PIV [Particle Image Velocimetry] more than we did then. In the early 90s, CFD was still very, very early days, so we were designing the car with flow-vis, tufts of wool and instinct and trying to figure out from it what you thought would be a good direction.
“If you look at the level of sophistication of aerodynamics that we have now, maybe even more so before the rule change, all the little details that we have, without CFD we wouldn’t have it because you just wouldn’t have the understanding of the physical flow. The windtunnel is still the referee, but CFD is where you get the ideas.
“Similarly, with the mechanical design of the car. At the time, computer-aided design and computer-aided machining were just starting to emerge. So the shapes were simpler. Simulation tools for vehicle dynamics and mechanics races.
“Again very, very basic, mostly instinct. We had data loggers but they don’t tell you… they tell you what the car is doing but it doesn’t give you the insight to know what to do next.
“For me this is the biggest change. I don’t think it’s the team size or the materials, it’s really the age of the computer and the amount of processing and simulation you have. It allows you to go into much more detail.
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“It’s what drove the numbers for much bigger teams. If you take Williams in the 90s, we had about 25 engineers. We have many multiples of that here now, but if you took all the guys we have now and took them back to the 90s, they wouldn’t have enough to do. You’d be ridiculously overpopulated.”
There it goes from a simple question. You just let him run – and learn along the way. I guess that’s how it is inside Red Bull.
But anyway, back to the increased importance of suspension in a car that generates its downforce in the underbody from running as close to the ground as possible, as other teams didn’t seem to have thought about it as deeply, I was surprised that the team advantage increased?
“I have been surprised. It’s not what we expected at all, the level of advantage we’ve had at most tracks this year compared to the opposition,” adds Newey.
“Over the years, very often when you come up with a completely new concept, the first year can be pretty good… Obviously there have been a few cars inspired by our last year’s car, but I don’t know, I don’t have any detailed knowledge of them, I can’t really comment.
“The thing about bounce is that it’s a multidimensional problem. So it’s obviously the aerodynamic shape of the car itself, then it’s combined with the suspension and probably the body stiffness and all kinds of things, as people have gradually discovered over the last year and a half.
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“So you have to look at it holistically. You can’t just focus on a single piece.
“I remember when I was at Fittipaldi [in 1980-82] Harvey Postlethwaite had a thing for the growing rubber suspension and decided to save some weight on the car he would try to ditch the springs and dampers and just sit the car on a set of rubber.
“It was the first time I’d ever been to a track and in the old pits at Silverstone Keke Rosberg came through and the car was bouncing so hard you could see air under the front tyres. He came in after a lap, wide-eyed and said ” this doesn’t work”!
“It was the first time for me that I realized that bounce wasn’t purely an aerodynamic problem.”
There’s an interesting background revealed when we ask how much of a challenge it was to maintain the car’s aerodynamic performance around the 2023 tuning setup with a 15mm increase in rear floor (and 10mm diffuser height).
“Oh, the interesting thing about that was when the change was announced last year, we were discussing it internally. Some of our men were saying, “no, we have to really fight for it.”
“But I was of the view that actually in the high-speed corners last year we were probably behind Ferrari. Our car was having problems at very high speed, so actually the throttle change might suit us, so we didn’t really push against it too much.
“It turned out to be a good fit for us.”
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Although the RB19 wasn’t very different visually from its predecessor, the changes in details were crucial.
One of the most important of these – generally missed – was the section change in the frame shape. It had a very enhanced ‘V’ shape. This opened up the volume in areas that were particularly interesting in a tunnel car.
There was more volume to feed the tunnels, there was more depth on the sides, which would allow a stronger vortex to form in the undercut. But it wasn’t the push, just value-added features.
“It’s evolutionary,” he says. “We had a ‘V’ shape in last year’s car, but we were a bit more aggressive in the nose area compared to this year. It’s really just front wheel wake management. As cars have become better understood, downforce has gone up and very often that means more demand on the front fender.
“So you have to put a little more effort into managing how you use the front wing.”
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The effectiveness of the car’s DRS has been improved, with a double kick in the diffuser up-ramp likely a key part of this. With the very aggressive spar wing continuing this ramp as it directs the airflow to the underside of the main wing, when the DRS was deployed, greater stall seemed to be achieved.
This was always much more apparent on low wing tracks when the drag of the wing itself on the spar-diffuser-floor wing combination would be less.
“It’s something we could have done last year if we had put energy into it,” Newey says. “It wasn’t a weakness before, but if you can increase the result, you get it.
“It’s a learning process. You critique what you have, you look at how you can improve it and that was the evolutionary aspect of this year’s car.
“You can look at it in two ways. If you qualify on pole and you disappear DRS is not that important. But you have it in qualifying so it’s useful there and in the race if you’re not in front it’s also very important.”
The car’s only weakness, if it can be called that, is that it was occasionally compromised by not being able to build front tire temperatures quickly enough to be ready for Turn 1 of a qualifying round. Verstappen was “only” on pole 13 times, but won 19 Grands Prix…
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“Yes, that’s the way we’ve developed the car. We tried to prioritize race performance over qualifying,” says Newey.
“We made that decision in ’21 when we were designing the car, to try to prioritize race performance over single-lap performance.
“It was a deliberate choice and we thought that if overtaking was going to get easier then that obviously meant that qualifying performance would be a slightly lower priority than in the past and it seems to have worked out.”
Given the Red Bulls’ great success in the first two years of these regulations, it’s no surprise that Newey likes them quite a bit.
“To be completely honest when I first saw these regs in 2020, I thought this looks very restrictive and quite boring. Many teams thought the same.
“We’ve been able to apply pressure to loosen them up a little bit. Then once you get into them, you realize there’s more flexibility in them when you first look at all the spec frames, gradients, price changes, etc.
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“Once you get down to the nitty-gritty, there’s actually a reasonable amount of freedom.”
In this detail and freedom lies the great success. You just have to have a mind like Newey.