Red bull

STARTS 369 | FIRST GP AUSTRALIA 2005 | WINS 113 | POLES 95 | FASTEST LAPS 95 | 2023 1ST

Red Bull heads into the season as the red-hot favourite once again. There’s no reason why a team that won all but one race in 2023 – for a 95.5% victory rate – should not be eyeing perfection this time around.

Historically, its package has been a rocketship in a straight line thanks to a very efficient aerodynamic layout allied to excellent Honda engine grunt, and packed-on downforce via its intricate floor arrangement to dominate in the corners. What undid the team in its 2023 Singapore Grand Prix defeat was an aversion to kerbs and bumpy courses. Fixing this has been a key target for the new campaign.

When its RB20 was unveiled, it was clear that Red Bull had not been content to produce another evolution of what had proved so successful since Formula 1’s new ground-effect era began in 2022. The car features two major redesigned elements on its upper aerodynamic surfaces – its cannon-like cooling gulleys high up, plus vertical sidepod inlets under a very slim horizontal one. The first two aspects suggest that Red Bull is considering a switch to something similar to Mercedes’ ‘zeropod’ approach, which would be staggering given its rival could not get that concept to work in 2022 and 2023.

Red Bull’s new elements didn’t appear to impact the team in testing, although it concealed its hand even more than usual in performance runs as well as race simulations. But it has been suggested that an even bigger sidepod overhaul is coming for the Japanese GP in April, a risk Red Bull apparently feels it needs to take. A further question overhanging the team as t