2021 Red Bull Racing F1 Team

[Tommy Cookers]

... I don't think gearing, other than the number of gears is regulated (Is it?)

it is

the 8 ratios (chosen by a PU manufacturer) are specified 'end-to-end' and alterable only at times eg annually etc
ie for each PU manufacturer one final drive ratio is used regardless of race venue

so the whole thing can be a sealed unit whose life is policeable

[Big Tea]

... I don't think gearing, other than the number of gears is regulated (Is it?)

it is

Ah, you mean For the avoidance of doubt, changes to the forward gear ratios under the provisions of this
Article may involve changes to either the gear ratio pairs defined in Article 9.7.3, or to the
final drive.?

That would depend on -

Each Competitor must nominate the forward gear ratios (calculated from engine crankshaft
to drive shafts) to be employed within their gearbox. These nominations must be declared to
the FIA technical delegate at or before the first Event of the Championship

Wouldn't it?

You may have a point Slo Poke

[ispano6]

Nice one mate. Coming from a rather difficult start to F1 and consistently peaking from 2018, no wonder Max put together the best season of his racing career. So many doubters have been silenced, hopefully forever. His performance in Zandvoort stands as his best, under such immense pressure of expectations. It was heart breaking to see the lap of the year not coming to fruision in Saudi. Mercedes found strange level of performance since Turkey, making Max work harder than ever in the season. I had a sinking feeling seeing such anamalous sway of power where his Red Bull stood no chance when an attack came from Mercedes in these past GPs, coupled with some poor starts. But it was a sweet end for such a fabuolous season of performance. With the weight of expectations of a championship off, hope he should be a far bigger power in the equation of championship battles of future.

I think those poor starts (they also happened at test starts) where due to the choices made on the engine settings. Everything to sustain higher speed each lap, at cost of start.

You have no way of knowing this for certain, and dare I say it had very little to do with honda. It could be a bunch of different reasons why starts have gotten worse later in the season, but it could also be that hamilton's starts have gotten phenomenal. I think it was a bit of both that made it look so bad.

Agreed. Max's reaction times were sometimes slower, and downforce levels and gear synchro were off in a couple. His Mexico and Brazil starts were very good.

[Slo Poke]

Would this contravene any rule? I don't think gearing, other than the number of gears is regulated (Is it?)

Hi, Big Tea:
Let me put it this way. As far as I’m aware 2021 cars are permitted eight forward gears and one reverse. With that being the case any overdrive configuration would be classed as a ninth gear surely, in my book, at least.
As soon as I saw the merc car nearly jump into warp speed Brazil I literally forgot there was a race in progress due to keeping my eye on car forty-four. I then thought about what I know is at work in their differential and how a ninth gear could/might be incorporated in it and it isn’t impossible.
At that point, or a few days later, I drafted out an e-mail and sent it in to RedBull. From this point I’m hypothesising somewhat but something was tested at Jeddah but not raced. Now let’s face it, the merc engine/Pu has been maxed out all season, save for the skip to capacitor usage at Silverstone and since so where the flippin’ ‘eck did warp speed come from. It don’t grow on trees!

But Hamilton only recorded the 5th highest speed in Abu Dhabi, why would it be geared lower than others if it was an unregulated 'extra'. You could watch an onboard lap and keep an eye and ear on RPM I suppose it would be evident if there were more 'drops' than numbers on the display
https://f1i.com/wp-content/uploads/2020 ... rap.v1.jpg

Hello again Big Tea:
The art of keeping what you have to yourself is hiding it!
Race driving is mainly about Absolute Precision in all things; going fast and going slow.

[jz11]

Long post incoming, lots of guesses and unproven speculation and probably a bit too much about Mercedes for an RB thread, but here goes:

I don't think there is any one thing that started to suddenly work on the Mercedes car, IMO that is not their approach, I think they had plenty in hand at the beginning of the season, and RB had slightly less - meaning, both of them were running at lets say 90% the first few races, and race by race they use up their performance reserve and gradually increase the cars speed to see how the competition react, and about the time Marko said - we're in trouble, what it meant - RB had used up all their saved tricks and there was nothing left in the pipeline, while Mercedes continued to become quicker and quicker, had Mercedes showed their full hand at the beginning, RB may have thrown in the towel and just put all the focus on the new car, which would put Mercedes in a compromised position for next year, and RB also could update their models for various bits of the Mercedes car, which is also undesirable, and I'm 100% sure they are building models not just for their own car, but for competition as well, it just makes all the sense to me.

Mercedes season long strategy has been far superior to any other teams, that of course has a lot to do with their engine development, which allowed them to explore other options more freely than the other teams, other teams thought - this one thing will give us 0.3sec and we'll be back in the hunt, and when they do match Mercedes, Mercedes simply use the next thing they had lined up and they are again untouchable in the next race - that is crushing for competition, and it happened season after season after season, because the ones trying to catch up essentially don't know the true deficit and thus cannot make the necessary decision to either continue their current design philosophy or switch to something radically different, because the current concept will clearly be exhausted and won't come close to Mercedes performance. I think this has been happening both on the engine front and the car, and because Merc knows both of these - they can then coordinate both branches of development to maximize the overall performance - that is one thing that customer teams absolutely cannot do, and this effect was noticeable in Mclaren-Honda years, when the car development expected a more powerful engine, but when it was clear that there will be less power available, they had reduce the df/drag on the car to not be sitting ducks on the track, which then leads to bad tire performance and overall the car just doesn't work, similar effect was noticeable when Ferrari were forced to stop using the "trick" on their engines, suddenly they were no more than a backmarker.

And because teams are closely involved in the token system, they can then use this very system, that was put in place to even the competition, to essentially prevent the competition ever reaching their level of performance, and I bet Mercedes took all advantage they could out of this, they have been sandbagging like nobody else to show they are not that far ahead, and thus not turn the token system into a joke, and during the season take one bag out at a time to imitate "normal development" - I think this was also why someone in the Abu Dhabi did what they did.

I'm not going to debate any of this with anyone, just thought I'd put my thoughts down, I'm not saying Mercedes cheated or any of the sort, just that they play a bigger game than the other teams, on more fronts, but this year RB had tucked away enough cards to mount a reasonable challenge and even that would have not been enough, I'd really hate to be competing with Mercedes in the long run, they are just on another level in that respect, hence the 8 straight titles, and I don't the cost cap thing is ever going to achieve anything to fight such dominance, it is just so easy to circumvent and make mockery of, and if Merc agreed to it, I'm sure they have already stacked their deck for that fight.

[ringo]

So you are saying they purposely u derperformed just to make things so close to the end and risk losing a record winning championship in the last lap to manipulation.
I thinkt is a simpler reason. They just got the setup better through understanding and possibly used less fuel over a race distance as they learned more to lighten the car.
Additionally Hamilton's health was improving.
The other factor is Max. We do not know if his performance was degrading over the season.
We saw the poor starts creep in and the lock ups and poorer race pace.

[lio007]

What I really wonder the most is how much RBR has sacrificed the '22 car to get the '21 championship. I'm afraid by far the most of all teams on the grid. We will see in a couple of months if we will see something like "from hero to zero".

[Alexf1]

So you are saying they purposely u derperformed just to make things so close to the end and risk losing a record winning championship in the last lap to manipulation.
I thinkt is a simpler reason. They just got the setup better through understanding and possibly used less fuel over a race distance as they learned more to lighten the car.
Additionally Hamilton's health was improving.
The other factor is Max. We do not know if his performance was degrading over the season.
We saw the poor starts creep in and the lock ups and poorer race pace.

You must have been looking at a different season than reality gave us throught your Hammi glasses. By the way, for someone who hoped Max would crash you seem to do a lot of whining about the RD using his rulebook..

[Big Tea]

Long post incoming, lots of guesses and unproven speculation and probably a bit too much about Mercedes for an RB thread, but here goes:

I don't think there is any one thing that started to suddenly work on the Mercedes car, IMO that is not their approach, I think they had plenty in hand at the beginning of the season, and RB had slightly less - meaning, both of them were running at lets say 90% the first few races, and race by race they use up their performance reserve and gradually increase the cars speed to see how the competition react, and about the time Marko said - we're in trouble, what it meant - RB had used up all their saved tricks and there was nothing left in the pipeline, while Mercedes continued to become quicker and quicker, had Mercedes showed their full hand at the beginning, RB may have thrown in the towel and just put all the focus on the new car, which would put Mercedes in a compromised position for next year, and RB also could update their models for various bits of the Mercedes car, which is also undesirable, and I'm 100% sure they are building models not just for their own car, but for competition as well, it just makes all the sense to me.

Mercedes season long strategy has been far superior to any other teams, that of course has a lot to do with their engine development, which allowed them to explore other options more freely than the other teams, other teams thought - this one thing will give us 0.3sec and we'll be back in the hunt, and when they do match Mercedes, Mercedes simply use the next thing they had lined up and they are again untouchable in the next race - that is crushing for competition, and it happened season after season after season, because the ones trying to catch up essentially don't know the true deficit and thus cannot make the necessary decision to either continue their current design philosophy or switch to something radically different, because the current concept will clearly be exhausted and won't come close to Mercedes performance. I think this has been happening both on the engine front and the car, and because Merc knows both of these - they can then coordinate both branches of development to maximize the overall performance - that is one thing that customer teams absolutely cannot do, and this effect was noticeable in Mclaren-Honda years, when the car development expected a more powerful engine, but when it was clear that there will be less power available, they had reduce the df/drag on the car to not be sitting ducks on the track, which then leads to bad tire performance and overall the car just doesn't work, similar effect was noticeable when Ferrari were forced to stop using the "trick" on their engines, suddenly they were no more than a backmarker.

And because teams are closely involved in the token system, they can then use this very system, that was put in place to even the competition, to essentially prevent the competition ever reaching their level of performance, and I bet Mercedes took all advantage they could out of this, they have been sandbagging like nobody else to show they are not that far ahead, and thus not turn the token system into a joke, and during the season take one bag out at a time to imitate "normal development" - I think this was also why someone in the Abu Dhabi did what they did.

I'm not going to debate any of this with anyone, just thought I'd put my thoughts down, I'm not saying Mercedes cheated or any of the sort, just that they play a bigger game than the other teams, on more fronts, but this year RB had tucked away enough cards to mount a reasonable challenge and even that would have not been enough, I'd really hate to be competing with Mercedes in the long run, they are just on another level in that respect, hence the 8 straight titles, and I don't the cost cap thing is ever going to achieve anything to fight such dominance, it is just so easy to circumvent and make mockery of, and if Merc agreed to it, I'm sure they have already stacked their deck for that fight.

I completely agree. If you don't know the scale of the problem you do not give up and you aim slightly above what you think the level is going to be. Once you have so much invested in it you have to follow through rather than change track.

I have to put my cards on the table here before going any deeper, Yes I like Red Bull, love Honda, and I also like Mercedes, Mclaren and Williams too, so am quite close to being an 'independent' and try not to take a 'side'.

I think something that has been apparent from Mercedes for quite a while now is that they are masters of misdirection Chapman style. If it looks like an aero gain, it is just as likely to be the engine and same for suspension etc.
Other teams are now learning from relocated engineers and designers rather than just observation and gut feeling so (RBR in particular) are catching up. (Ferrari next year?)

Having an initial advantage means they can chose where to develop rather than someone playing catch up and seeing an obvious advantage to follow, which could easily not really be as much of an advantage as envisaged but still took up the resources.

It has been common practice for centuries never to begin a war with your best weapons as you then have nowhere to go if they are not good enough and you have nothing in hand. Merc have understood and played this very well.

I don't know if the tales were started by Merc themselves or just brought out conveniently by others but I think so much time and effort has been spent looking for a silver bullet that does not exist that they have kept much of the advantage due to wasted effort of others.

[jz11]

So you are saying they purposely u derperformed just to make things so close to the end and risk losing a record winning championship in the last lap to manipulation.
I thinkt is a simpler reason. They just got the setup better through understanding and possibly used less fuel over a race distance as they learned more to lighten the car.
Additionally Hamilton's health was improving.
The other factor is Max. We do not know if his performance was degrading over the season.
We saw the poor starts creep in and the lock ups and poorer race pace.

I'm saying -they "underperformed" for years, not just last couple seasons while still continuing development, they can then cherry pick whatever is necessary to beat the competition, which explains why everyone is always baffled by their ever increasing pace while the so called development freezes and/or token systems implemented to fight this exact thing are in place

one thing I forgot to mention - the engine, thanks to F1-tempo, it is much easier to look at the relative data, and what I saw in the last race was that Mercedes are spending A LOT less time harvesting at the ends of straights, a lot less, which means they have significant advantage at the engine front (this is multifaceted again, much more complex than just a better ERS), something that again the token system was trying to prevent

I'll reiterate - I don't think they cheated at anything, they simply had much more in reserve for when it was necessary, and yes, they would have beaten RB this year, and had, the thing that really backfired was the conservative approach to the race, something they use to mask the max performance of the car on a regular basis (thanks to the IMO dumb "endurance racing" rules)

Had they been playing more openly, not hiding anything, the competition could then judge how much they are missing and what direction to go with their development, and FIA could come up with things that actually work to level the playing field (which is one of their objectives) and not play into the dominating teams hand year after year.

Regarding this season they simply underestimated how much RB were hiding, they didn't expect this to go on for so long (and I think they make a show out of Lewis overcoming competition, instead of outright dominating from the start), and IMO Max drove better than Lewis over the whole season, less pure driver mistakes, Lewis had a great season finishing run, but overall Max was slightly better, he had to take bigger risks also that payed off (and sometimes they didn't), Lewis and Mercedes thought they didn't need to, and cars pace at the closing part of the season showed as much, so did the race pace at Abu Dhabi, they had it in the bag till almost the very end, and they were SURE they will win again, that is what made them so mad at the end, had it been a real competition - they would accept the defeat much more gracefully - that is also a tell of how they do things IMO

[jumpingfish]

So you are saying they purposely u derperformed just to make things so close to the end and risk losing a record winning championship in the last lap to manipulation.
I thinkt is a simpler reason. They just got the setup better through understanding and possibly used less fuel over a race distance as they learned more to lighten the car.
Additionally Hamilton's health was improving.
The other factor is Max. We do not know if his performance was degrading over the season.
We saw the poor starts creep in and the lock ups and poorer race pace.

I'm saying -they "underperformed" for years, not just last couple seasons while still continuing development, they can then cherry pick whatever is necessary to beat the competition, which explains why everyone is always baffled by their ever increasing pace while the so called development freezes and/or token systems implemented to fight this exact thing are in place

one thing I forgot to mention - the engine, thanks to F1-tempo, it is much easier to look at the relative data, and what I saw in the last race was that Mercedes are spending A LOT less time harvesting at the ends of straights, a lot less, which means they have significant advantage at the engine front (this is multifaceted again, much more complex than just a better ERS), something that again the token system was trying to prevent

I'll reiterate - I don't think they cheated at anything, they simply had much more in reserve for when it was necessary, and yes, they would have beaten RB this year, and had, the thing that really backfired was the conservative approach to the race, something they use to mask the max performance of the car on a regular basis (thanks to the IMO dumb "endurance racing" rules)

Had they been playing more openly, not hiding anything, the competition could then judge how much they are missing and what direction to go with their development, and FIA could come up with things that actually work to level the playing field (which is one of their objectives) and not play into the dominating teams hand year after year.

Regarding this season they simply underestimated how much RB were hiding, they didn't expect this to go on for so long (and I think they make a show out of Lewis overcoming competition, instead of outright dominating from the start), and IMO Max drove better than Lewis over the whole season, less pure driver mistakes, Lewis had a great season finishing run, but overall Max was slightly better, he had to take bigger risks also that payed off (and sometimes they didn't), Lewis and Mercedes thought they didn't need to, and cars pace at the closing part of the season showed as much, so did the race pace at Abu Dhabi, they had it in the bag till almost the very end, and they were SURE they will win again, that is what made them so mad at the end, had it been a real competition - they would accept the defeat much more gracefully - that is also a tell of how they do things IMO

It makes sense, especially when consider the words of their former employee, who talked about lowering engine performance in order not to look very strong against other competitors in 2014 or 2015.

[Ryar]

Long post incoming, ................

All of this could have been of nought if Max wouldn't have suffered in Baku, Silverstone, Hungary, Italy (slow stop due to adhoc pit stop rule introduction) and the consequence of engine penalties for no fault of their own. RB could have used the option of using an extra engine more strategically, than being forced on. If Max would have had a trouble free season, the championship could have been over long back and we wouldn't be speculating the rise of Mercedes power for the last few races and both teams would have moved on to 2022.

In fact, if anything this season was a rude awakening for Mercedes on their PU front. So much unreliability and they had to run their engines full power for most part of the race on most races, which they hadn't done ever in hybrid era. They were forced to spend more time for 2021 than they would have liked, as in earlier years. This has been the year of Honda, who have not just brought power on par with Mercedes, but reliability far exceeding that of Mercedes. For me personally, I was completely hopeless for such a used engine to be even be competitive in Saudi and Abu Dhabi, compared to a brand new Mercedes engine and for the dubious (arguable) rear wing. I am sure in time, there would be some news of how Mercedes managed to turn up the engine power since Silverstone and more particularly from Brazil.

[hollus]

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Is there a Mercedes thread somewhere?

I mean, comparing to Reb Bull is totally OK.

[ringo]

They cannot help themselves.

I was hoping to see more about the all round RB16 car and team and how they were able to be so competitive on the development front as well as the strategy front.
But it seems everyone is baffled about the less than perfect Mercedes car.
I want to know why the RB16 worked everywhere and had no weaknesses.

[seense]

From Silverstone Merc had the better package on every circuit but Mexico. Luckily rb have max wringing the neck of it.

Max best driver of 2021 according to the teambosses.