'Evolution Not Revolution': Horner Hints Red Bull's Development Direction

Sunday, 24 December 2023 at 19:00

The team principal of the 2023 Champion team, Christian Horner, hinted at the direction Red Bull will take with their 2024 car - the RB20.

Red Bull Racing team won the second consecutive season in Formula One with quite a significant gap on its competitors after winning 21 out of 22 races.

Some drivers like Carlos Sainz suspect Max Verstappen never even had to extract 100% of his car, and he still won 19 races. Red Bull goes into the break with a headstart over its competition, but it is crucial to keep the pace advantage in order to be able to repeat the success.

While multiple teams like Ferrari and Mercedes warned they were going to be making big changes to their cars, Red Bull's team principal explained that wouldn't be the case for his team. He told the media:

"Evolution not revolution. All areas have been revisited in the car, and we can't afford to have any complacency."

Read also

Verstappen Reveals Mission Of His Exciting New Project Vertappen.com Racing

What Red Bull currently has is definitely working, so it makes sense from their side to just keep upgrading the current concept, whereas other teams that are lagging behind need to make riskier changes to catch up.

"So the car is very much an evolution of a theme. We're not reinventing the wheel, and that has been very much the route of the engineering path over the last 12 months."

The team principal tried to avoid setting high expectations as he explained that his team was about to reach the top of the development curve, and that might allow others to close the gap to Red Bull throughout the next two seasons.

"I'm fully expecting with stable regs and diminishing returns for us because I think we got to the top of the curve quicker than others, the field is going to converge."

Horner hinted the "big changes" that everybody plans to implement will go the way of Red Bull's concept philosophy so he expects even more cars that look alike on the 2024 grid. He added:

“There's always a reset as you go into the following year, and I'm convinced that you'll see a lot more cars that perhaps look like an RB19 philosophy."