TECH TUESDAY: The main factors behind Red Bull’s Singapore slump and how they bounced back in style at Suzuka.

Red Bull’s spectacular failure in Singapore and equally spectacular comeback at Suzuka show that this generation of cars is very sensitive to adjustments, especially when it comes to ride height.

The ground impact principle by which these vehicles generate most of the downforce is significantly more effective the closer the lowest point of the floor is to the ground, until it is so low that the airflow stops.

The car’s ground clearance height when parked in the garage is only the basis for the actual ground clearance height that the car will see when running on the track. Downforce is usually proportional to speed and as speed and downforce increase, the vehicle is forced to lower the suspension, increasing again as speed decreases.

There are also effects on roll height when the vehicle is cornering, pitching when braking and pitching when accelerating, as well as any bumps or curbs that need to be absorbed. The team will set the car’s static height as low as possible to maximize downforce, but different tracks impose different practical limits on how high this can be.

There is a further potential limitation – that of the regulation underfloor plank. This is there to prevent teams running their cars dangerously low and was introduced after the fatal accidents of Imola 1994. The plank runs up the middle of the centre of the floor and is 10mm deep. There must be at least 9mm of plank depth remaining at the end of the race.

For most teams, the board usually does not stipulate their minimum ride height because they have historically encountered aerodynamic problems when bouncing or jumping.
Venturi tunnel stops tend to be at ride heights higher than the board-imposed minimum. But it’s not always Red Bull. Part of the RB19’s aerodynamic superiority is in fact the combination of tunnel design and rear suspension that allows it to achieve a lower ride height at speed without causing dolphins.

At Spa – where the combination of speed and compression of the Eau Rouge created enormous forces on the car – Red Bull had to ask Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez to back off every lap at this crucial moment so as not to overpower the car. too many broken boards. That way, they could maintain the low ride height that gave them high performance the rest of the way.

Around Baku and Monaco, street circuits where bumps and camber along the entire length of the track create relatively high ride heights, Red Bull’s advantage is smaller than elsewhere.

Any track that requires a high ride height disproportionately hurts Red Bull, as does any track with short corners – like most tracks – because it punishes Red The Bull is reluctant to generate front tire temperature quickly. Thus, in Baku, he lost pole position to Ferrari while in Monaco, Verstappen just beat Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin.

Singapore, another relatively bumpy urban route, is said to be just as difficult. To prevent collisions and front tire heating problems, Red Bull has introduced a softer suspension system. There is also a new floor that is part of the ongoing auto development and is not exclusive to Singapore. Changes to the vortex generators at the edges of the floor only affect the visible parts of the new floor, including the remodeled diffuser wall.

Notably, this was the first race to adopt the stricter definition of Engineering Principles 18 and 34, the latter relating specifically to frame and plank assembly.

During Friday practice the softer suspension was found to be unsuitable when running with the chosen ride height. Bumps in part of the track had been smoothed out with a resurface but other parts remained bumpy and the Red Bull seemed to have problems accommodating the contrasting demands.

To take the complicating factor of the new floor out of understanding where the problems lay, they reverted to the old floor from Saturday onwards, with the intention to revisit that question in Suzuka. As well as the floor change, the suspension was stiffened for Saturday FP3 and, while this reduced the bottoming and brake locking, it reduced rear grip even further and made generating tyre temperature more difficult.

With the car in this form it was within 0.3s of the Ferrari. For qualifying the team made further changes, including lowering the ride height. It proved to be a disastrous move and neither driver was able to graduate from Q2.

In summary, the Red Bull appeared to lose a bigger proportion of its usual downforce than other cars when its ride height was raised to cope with the demands of the track. This was then compounded by the set-up choices made.

A few days later, around Suzuka, a conventional racetrack with a much flatter surface, that problem dissolved and the RB19 returned to its usual form.

For the first practice session Red Bull conducted a back-to-back test between its two floors, with Perez on the old one which had been raced on both cars in Singapore and Verstappen on the new one which had been discarded in Singapore after Friday. This was just a precaution to confirm that the new floor did not have an undiagnosed problem and had not been part of the Singapore under-performance.

Verstappen dominated the first practice session in Suzuka and so the new floor was fitted also to Perez’s car for the rest of the weekend. Perez went significantly quicker with the new floor than he had with the old one, finally confirming that F1’s fastest car had been made even faster.