Red Bull RB20

[Blackout]

My contact at MK has informed me that RB will indeed incorporate micro-sidepods, albeit not where you think.
First they replaced their twin air-to-air intercoolers with a water one, like most cars today, to empty up the sidepods. Therefore, the remaining sidepod cooling will be pushed into the monocoque recesses that were made for the intercoolers (as illustrated in my old drawing). Furthermore, they will continue to rely on a significant centerline cooling system. And to address the drag issue associated with the rear wheels, RB will put... delta-shaped & empty sidepods in front of them, as seen in the Brabham Bt55 or the Tyrrell 012 and other cars of that era.

[venkyhere]

I dont even understand the usage of the world 'zeropod' in the RB20 context, irrespective of whether the slit intake is vertical or horizontal. That's because, the word in 2022, only meant

no cooling apparatus located far away 'laterally' from the center tub

on the W13 Mercedes.
It has no meaning related to the shape and orientation of the air intake for engine/cooling/whatever.

So whenever we are discussing "can Redbull make it work, that which Mercedes couldn't". the "it" refers to vertical air intake and NOT zeropods. Because no one is doing zeropods.

[AR3-GP]

My contact at MK has informed me that RB will indeed incorporate micro-sidepods, albeit not where you think.
First they replaced their twin air-to-air intercoolers with a water one, like most cars today, to empty up the sidepods. Therefore, the remaining sidepod cooling will be pushed into the monocoque recesses that were made for the intercoolers (as illustrated in my old drawing). Furthermore, they will continue to rely on a significant centerline cooling system. And to address the drag issue associated with the rear wheels, RB will put... delta-shaped & empty sidepods in front of them, as seen in the Brabham Bt55 or the Tyrrell 012 and other cars of that era.
https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-yzgoj/i ... 71.jpg?c=2

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GGb5EgTWAAA ... name=large

I couldn't tell if this post was serious or not, but if so...intriguing.

[hollus]

Posts talking about gained tenths (even from other cars, come on!) have been deleted or will be shortly. The posters got (get, mostly) the text back, you are welcome to post them in the team thread.
As usual every year at this time:
a) Welcome to all the newbies!
b) No lap times, no track or championship position, no winning and losing in the car threads. Only hardware here, winning and losing goes in the team threads. Thanks.

Only talk about Mercedes here to illustrate a RB point, pure Mercedes points will be sniped and if repeated, warnings might follow.

[bagajohny]

My contact at MK has informed me that RB will indeed incorporate micro-sidepods, albeit not where you think.
First they replaced their twin air-to-air intercoolers with a water one, like most cars today, to empty up the sidepods. Therefore, the remaining sidepod cooling will be pushed into the monocoque recesses that were made for the intercoolers (as illustrated in my old drawing). Furthermore, they will continue to rely on a significant centerline cooling system. And to address the drag issue associated with the rear wheels, RB will put... delta-shaped & empty sidepods in front of them, as seen in the Brabham Bt55 or the Tyrrell 012 and other cars of that era.
https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-yzgoj/i ... 71.jpg?c=2

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GGb5EgTWAAA ... name=large

I couldn't tell if this post was serious or not, but if so...intriguing.

Is this even allowed with current regs?

[morefirejules08]

That they are going to lose alot of sidepod just like W13 did from A to B

You can see here how shrink wrapped the rear of the W13 was before testing in 2022 and the RB20 would have to lose significantly more than that to go full zeropod
https://x.com/MSM_Christian/status/1494 ... 71463?s=20

The current exterior and sidepod design is planned for high-temperature tests and the first three races.
Red Bull plans to bring its "own zeropod" design to the Japanese Grand Prix weekend!
Mercedes was not successful in the zeropod design, let's see what Red Bull will do

What does that have to do with the fact RB would have to remove significantly more sidepod than Mercedes did in 22 to implement zeropod?

[Cs98]

My contact at MK has informed me that RB will indeed incorporate micro-sidepods, albeit not where you think.
First they replaced their twin air-to-air intercoolers with a water one, like most cars today, to empty up the sidepods. Therefore, the remaining sidepod cooling will be pushed into the monocoque recesses that were made for the intercoolers (as illustrated in my old drawing). Furthermore, they will continue to rely on a significant centerline cooling system. And to address the drag issue associated with the rear wheels, RB will put... delta-shaped & empty sidepods in front of them, as seen in the Brabham Bt55 or the Tyrrell 012 and other cars of that era.
https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-yzgoj/i ... 71.jpg?c=2

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GGb5EgTWAAA ... name=large

That sounds completely wild. Not sure if you are being serious. That would be a departure from like 50 years of sidepod convention, probably more radical than the idea of the zeropod we saw in 2022. That was just removing the sidepod. This is removing the sidepod and re-positioning it in a totally unconventional space.

[AR3-GP]

My contact at MK has informed me that RB will indeed incorporate micro-sidepods, albeit not where you think.
First they replaced their twin air-to-air intercoolers with a water one, like most cars today, to empty up the sidepods. Therefore, the remaining sidepod cooling will be pushed into the monocoque recesses that were made for the intercoolers (as illustrated in my old drawing). Furthermore, they will continue to rely on a significant centerline cooling system. And to address the drag issue associated with the rear wheels, RB will put... delta-shaped & empty sidepods in front of them, as seen in the Brabham Bt55 or the Tyrrell 012 and other cars of that era.
https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-yzgoj/i ... 71.jpg?c=2

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GGb5EgTWAAA ... name=large

I couldn't tell if this post was serious or not, but if so...intriguing.

Is this even allowed with current regs?

Christian Horner said during the launch:

Christian Horner said:

“I think there’s some great innovation on the car as well, which will no doubt get scrutinized over the coming weeks. Creativity has been strong in the team and you can see that in some of the solutions that they’ve come up with. It’s not a conservative evolution — there’s some great innovation on this car.”

https://racer.com/2024/02/15/red-bull-s ... e-on-rb20/


So there is already some hinting that not all is as it seems...

He is already foreshadowing somewhat to interesting interpretations of the regulations.

[bagajohny]

I couldn't tell if this post was serious or not, but if so...intriguing.

Is this even allowed with current regs?

Christian Horner said during the launch:

Christian Horner said:


https://racer.com/2024/02/15/red-bull-s ... e-on-rb20/


So there is already some hinting that not all is as it seems...

He is already foreshadowing somewhat to interesting interpretations of the regulations.

https://www.motorsportweek.com/2024/02/ ... -approach/

I don’t know who to believe.

[hollus]

My wholly amateur eye-ball CFD take on the mega-lips (ignoring if they are over or under and where any number of slots might end):

The whole point of the very far out there lip might simply be to extend the lip start as far forward and as far up as possible.



Notice that, new from last year, a lot of lip is as far up as possible now. It stays there for a while.
To me, this is a very simple attempt to pack as much air as possible under the lip, partially bound by the Rauch panel. (The Rauch panel mostly fences air under the floor but a bit over the floor as well?)

This follows a bit on Vanja's inlet spill post: viewtopic.php?p=1186026#p1186026 but I think that the inlet spill is only a second order effect.
The amount of air "trapped" under the lip, to the side of the cockpit, is massive, is it like 50x50 cm2 each side? And with the cockpit and sidepod, it is forced to shrink both vertically and horizontally to something like 30x10 cm2 in the underbite.
That is (say) 2500 cm2 of cross section forced to try to fit in 300 cm2 of cross-section under the sidepod. It is like a funnel cut in half. Sure, some air acceleration in the undercut will happen, and thus it will take more flow than its share, but most of that air will be forced down and (yes, to spill) sidewards... onto the whole floor flick bonanza.
That air has been accelerated downwards and aggressively pushed sideways, and thus it mimics the effect of the old Y250 vortex for "floor sealing".
I had that feeling already last year, and now that the small kink in the cockpit edge under the sidepod is gone and the undercut is bigger, they tried to go to the absolute maximum extent of air "trapped" under that lip, because as more air, beneficial to the rear, goes under the sidepod, they needed a bit more air to go sideways over the floor edge.

It might be too simplistic, but the RB evolution has been in that direction since 2022, and it is one thing that other teams did not have until very recently, with McL and now Aston somewhat following suit but a few steps behind.

It is only IMO, but maybe this is a performance differentiator, at the macro-flow level, rather than micro-details. The micro details in the floor edge then simply take advantage of this extra outwards flow.

[Dr Obbs]

My contact at MK has informed me that RB will indeed incorporate micro-sidepods, albeit not where you think.
First they replaced their twin air-to-air intercoolers with a water one, like most cars today, to empty up the sidepods. Therefore, the remaining sidepod cooling will be pushed into the monocoque recesses that were made for the intercoolers (as illustrated in my old drawing). Furthermore, they will continue to rely on a significant centerline cooling system. And to address the drag issue associated with the rear wheels, RB will put... delta-shaped & empty sidepods in front of them, as seen in the Brabham Bt55 or the Tyrrell 012 and other cars of that era.
https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-yzgoj/i ... 71.jpg?c=2

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GGb5EgTWAAA ... name=large

I couldn't tell if this post was serious or not, but if so...intriguing.

Is this even allowed with current regs?

I mean as far as I know you could move your volumes further back, but as long as you fit in the RBW-COKE regulation volume, you are ok. The rules in this volume vs, the SPOD one are different. From what I can see you can't have any cooling inlets in the COKE volume, but you can have cooling exits? So theoretically, if you don't need cooling inlets because you are using the centerline, then maybe you could move these structures back. But frankly, I don't buy it, nor can I tell if the OP was a joke or not.

What I am hearing is that there will be quite some interesting developments coming this year. But that's the extent of it.

[vorticism]

Zeropods, but not as we know them, Jim. Greater-than-zeropods. >0pods. I could see them introducing very large waterslides, essentially deflating the sidepod, but the W13 concept had too many compromises to use as a copy+paste exercise.

https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-yzgoj/i ... 71.jpg?c=2

Good illustrations +1 I remember seeing them before. It would be great to see something so bold re: delta pods but the regulations prevent the use of non-tapering bodywork at the rear of the car. In the region of the rearmost engine cover/sidepods, the bodywork cannot flare out.

Very well could be, and it could be an S-duct or some other type of duct. But the coincidence of finding slot where an engine intake is, oddly, permitted, seemed like too much of a coincidence. A question would be, why did Ferrari choose the S-duct if it's permissible to also place engine intakes there.

It's not a coincidence at all

"The team can make further use of a trick it deployed in 2023 to partly offset the Aerodynamic Testing Restrictions which limit wind tunnel runs and CFD simulations – with Red Bull the most affected last year due to its lead in the constructors’ championship in addition to a further 10% cut as punishment for exceeding the 2021 cost cap.
The Aerodynamic Testing Restrictions allow exceptions for “wind tunnel testing solely for the development of power unit heat exchangers that reject heat to air, or the running of the power unit from a boundary commencing at the power unit air intake ducts. As per last season, and again with a shift to Mercedes-style zero-pods, Red Bull has placed an emphasis on upgrades that lean towards cooling. The repackaging of the internal components falls outside of the ATR to then enable the team to spend less of its allowance refining the external bodywork."

https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/red-b ... /10576566/

+1 Good point. The sidepod engine intakes I suggested below could facilitate more compact sidepods generally, whatever shape they are, by permitting more centerline cooling.

[ispano6]

It does have characteristics of speedboat designs but it seemed to me that Redbull looked to the W14 concept to address the low speed cornering and kerb riding Max said was a weakness of the RB19. Maybe Bill Elliott gets the last laugh.

[deadhead]

Amazing.

How would the diffuser work on the Tyrrell 012 RB20?

[Mmgnt]

My understanding based on what I'd read (somewhere... Can't find it now) is that RB19s top speed advantage was partially due to how the radiator spillage was directed over the sidepods. Basically it reduced DF but also drag at high speeds only.

Does anyone recall if this is true and/or specifics?

If it is the case, I wonder how they are planning to achieve the same thing with this new design, if the spillage is under the pods instead...