Who will stop Red Bull and Max Verstappen in 2024? That is a question many are asking, but few seem to have an answer for, with Adrian Newey steering the RB20’s development.
Due to Red Bull’s dominance in the 2023 season, most attention is now focused on the battle between Mercedes and Ferrari for second place in the Constructors’ standings.
With two races remaining, the Brackley-based team led by twenty points, and all attention is now on the 2024 cars.
Indeed, the latest rumours from the paddock in Brazil is that Red Bull would once again be capable of annihilating the field once again in 2024.
These rumours coincidentally emerged thanks to the heavy gusts of wind that plagued qualifying on Friday at Interlagos.
Privately, the team and drivers expressed amazement at a phenomenon never experienced with the RB19 before.
Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez described the car as feeling ‘very slowed down’ and unbalanced, as if it had damaged suspension.
But as the wind affected the RB19, Adrian Newey stepped in during the usual technical debriefing, remotely, to offer pointers, with an eye to 2024 and the RB20.
Revolution under the car.
The RB20 is set to be an extreme take on the concepts developed by the RB19 – and while it will visually maintain similarities with the 2023 car, next’s year’s design will follow a different aerodynamic concept.
It is to be more refined, with the downforce created and distributed in a radically different way to now, with the floor working differently, adopting different volumetric conformation of the Venturi channels that suck the car to the ground and create the ground effects.
Technical Director Pierre Wache and the aerodynamicists have found various areas of the RB19 to be almost perfect, with only marginal evolutions and no radical developments needed, owing to the significant pace advantage over rivals.
Consequently, all the modifications found to address the weak points of the RB19 were decided to be incorporated into the new project; the effects of the wind gusts were probably rendered much less significant due to the altered downforce generation and distribution.
This means that, even though rival teams are currently having difficulty catching Red Bull and Max Verstappen, the team appears to be taking extremely drastic measures to keep them from getting any closer.