Newey Gives Hope To Rivals: Red Bull Now 'Struggling' With Development Progress

Wednesday, 17 April 2024 at 10:30

Adrian Newey (Red Bull's Chief Technical Officer) revealed recently that his team is struggling to find gains.

As shown in their results over the last two seasons, Red Bull nailed the car concept for the 2022 regulations. While it is clear many people contributed to the team's success, Adrian Newey (who recently also warned about the hidden danger of one specific regulation) is said to have played an essential role.

In a recent interview with RacingNews365, the Chief Technical Officer of a team from Milton Keynes revealed that he didn't feel there would be enough wiggle room when he read the 2022 regulations for the first time.

"From a design point of view, I enjoy regulation changes, providing those regulation changes give a reasonable amount of freedom."

"I must admit, when I first saw these current regulations that I was quite depressed by them, they looked extremely prescriptive."

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However, when all F1 teams unveiled their cars on the starting grid at Bahrain International Circuit for the pre-season testing, it became clear that quite a few different directions could have been taken.

"Luckily, there was a bit of a relaxation towards the end. But actually, once we got into the detail, combined with that relaxation, there's been a reasonable amount of freedom within them – as you saw particularly early in 2022, there were lots of different solutions."

All designs started slowly converging towards the one that looked the fastest, which was Red Bull's. While the Austrian team still dominates due to its speed advantage, perfect strategy, pit stops, and drivers' performance, it is clear the gap between them and the rest of the field is becoming smaller and smaller.

The team from Milton Keynes made some significant changes to their concept coming into this season, which allowed them to retain some of their advantage, but Newey admitted that his team was already struggling to find gains.

"They're starting to converge now, but we're now into that sort of: 'OK, we've done some visual changes for this year's car, but the principles are the same,' so the differences are reducing internally."