Newey Reveals Red Bull's 'Deliberate Choice' To Sacrifice Crucial Aspect Of RB19's Performance

Thursday, 04 January 2024 at 08:00

The man behind RB19 (Red Bull's 2023 car), Adrian Newey, explained he and his team deliberately chose to sacrifice crucial aspects in order to improve race performance.

RB19 car will go down in the history of Formula One as one of the most dominant cars ever. It allowed Max Verstappen, with Sergio Perez, to win 19 out of 22 races and completely annihilate Red Bull's rivals.

Even though Red Bull's competitors managed to outperform the team from Milton Keynes during a few qualifying sessions, they never stood a chance in the race.

The chief technical officer of the Red Bull Racing F1 team, Adrien Newey, explained it is not a coincidence that his two cars performed so well on Sundays. Speaking to The Race, he said:

"Yes, that’s just the way we’ve developed the car. We’ve tried to prioritize race performance more than qualifying."

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Apparently, Red Bull already felt it was going to be the right way in 21 when the decision was made, and it turned out to be one of the best decisions for the team.

"We made that decision back in ’21 when we were designing the car to try to prioritize the race performance over one-lap performance."

No matter whether Verstappen started from sixth, ninth, or 15th place, Red Bull's rivals knew he would come flying by at some stage of the race due to supreme race pace.

"It was a deliberate choice, and we felt that if the overtaking was going to become easier then that presumably meant qualifying performance would be slightly lower priority than in the past, and it seems to have worked out."

Despite the fantastic season, Newey revealed he has never been satisfied with the RB19 and suggested there is a lot of space for improvement.

We are set to find out the design of the RB20 (2024 car) sometime around mid-February. How different do you think this year's car will be compared to the previous one?