2025 Oracle Red Bull Racing F1 Team

[Emag]

Mclaren wouldn’t be saying it won’t change anything if it was going to change anything because if they are nowhere come Spain, they lose all credibility. Red Bulls’s opinion doesn’t really matter because they don’t know how the Mclaren car works. It was interesting that Leclerc, Russell, and Hamilton also made some comments about Spain though suggesting to expect a change in the pecking order …but it may be a case of competitors being wishful. They had also hoped that several TDs would hobble Red Bull in the past.

But also, Mclaren was very cagey about mini-drs last year so they are very sensitive about PR. They claimed that it was the goodness of their own hearts that made them decided to remove the mini-drs.

The change is only reducing the flexibility by 5mm at the specified load. I would guess it’s worth 1 tenth (average) at most. Mclaren will have to make more compromises because the car will be either draggier with the same wing load or they lose some front downforce in order to maintain straight line speed.

I find this interesting too, we know that Mercedes and Ferrari ran a flexi front wing in 2024, so how will the new test in Spain not affect them too if at all?

Maybe they understand the significance of it because they have taken advantage of it. Mercedes has had their serpent wing since 2023 I feel. Ferrari brought their own in COTA last year. However they could feel their implementation is a cheap imitation of the Mclaren wing so when the playing field is leveled they hope to gain some ground.

I tend to think there’s something here (small though). It’s one thing if it’s just Red Bull (you could call it sour grapes) but Ferrari and Mercedes have their eye on it too. Usually when drivers talk anything technical, they are just parroting what they have heard in their engineering briefings.

Actually Mercedes probably had the most flexible front wing in 2022 already, whereas McLaren had a front wing which flexed at least as much as their 2024 front wing in early 2023 at the latest.

…

And sure enough, Mercedes was already utilizing the flexing front wings to quite an extreme degree I would say, since back in 2022 :

https://i.imgur.com/lmwyxVy.png

It was very hard to find nose cam footage of this car for some reason, but I was certain that they must have had it back then just judging by how much angle there was on that front wing back in 2022 and I wanted to confirm those suspicions. Finally after some browsing, I came across this video.

…

The only constant is RedBull having the most rigid wings out of them all throughout this entire ground effect era.

[Farnborough]

Recently posted



Is this a current test this week ?

[rbirules]

Recently posted



Is this a current test this week ?

Yes, it was yesterday that Yuki did a test of the RB19. Somebody posted a tweet about it on the previous page.

[Bill]

They want yuki to perform and improve yet when it comes quali they make life difficult for him in japan they gave him worn tires and left it to last run a wrong strategy for someone inexprienced with car ,they also damped a lot of downforce making him slow on straights .in saudi they also gave him only one run in q3 even though doing multiple runs would have helped him in light on his experience similar to what Max got.

[Seanspeed]

They want yuki to perform and improve yet when it comes quali they make life difficult for him in japan they gave him worn tires and left it to last run a wrong strategy for someone inexprienced with car ,they also damped a lot of downforce making him slow on straights .in saudi they also gave him only one run in q3 even though doing multiple runs would have helped him in light on his experience similar to what Max got.

If he was faster, he'd have more tires left. That's how it works. Red Bull wasn't making it difficult for Yuki, they were doing what was necessary to help him even scrape into Q3 in the first place. It's natural that only the top cars/drivers will be able to have two proper runs in Q3, because they managed to get through an earlier session without needing to use up an extra fresh set.

[AR3-GP]

Yuki asked for the higher downforce setup for more consistency.

He needed to use extra tires to get to Q3. If they made him do 2nd run in Q1 on used tires and he got knocked out, then you would be complaining that they didn't let him get out of Q1.

There's nothing to complain about. He made Q3 in the last 2 weekends. With such a car, and the history of his predecessors, this is fine. Next step is to start putting pressure on Ferrari and Mercedes. Antonelli and Hamilton are beatable.

[AR3-GP]

This article confirms something that I proposed a week or 2 ago. The windtunnel is not the issue. VCARB engineers say they are not having correlation issues and they use the same windtunnel.

What it means is that the specific design direction that they chose lent itself to more unreliable airflows. Airflows that didn't translate from scale model to real world, or airflows that were prone to inconsistencies both in the windtunnel and the real world, which is why there are discrepancies.

This is a good thing because it means it is less likely that the 2026 car has problems because of the windtunnel. It's more a matter of good ideas vs bad ideas. It also means that the 2025 car could improve as long as they move away from the faulty airflows which have plagued last year's car. There has been some suggestion (viewtopic.php?p=1280689#p1280689) that the internal cooling airflows and deviations between the simulation and the real thing have triggered a broader breakdown of the aero around the rest of the car, especially in yaw where the old car was prone to an unpredictable balance.

VCARB began the F1 2025 campaign as a major threat within the top 10, particularly over one lap.

“Well, I think they have, because they’re not on pole position, are they?” Horner struck back with.

But, Chandhok said he has been in contact with VCARB personnel, who have confirmed to him that they are not seeing any correlation issues between the windtunnel and track.

That, therefore, led to a blunt verdict from Chandhok on Horner’s comments.

Speaking on Sky F1’s The F1 Show podcast, Chandhok said: “Every time I listen to Christian Horner’s ‘our wind tunnel’s a relic of the Cold War’ thing, it’s just PR spin, isn’t it?

“He’s such a master politician. He’s the master of deflection.

“I don’t see Racing Bulls complaining about correlation. They use the same wind tunnel. I actually asked a couple of the people at Racing Bulls whether they’d struggled with the correlation. They said ‘nope’.

“It comes back to a Red Bull Racing issue.”

https://www.planetf1.com/news/christian ... windtunnel