Paa wrote: ↑01 Aug 2025, 00:39
I think it was really a power struggle within Red Bull and Horner lost it at the end.
Maybe. Horner is not one of the owners of Red Bull. I'm not sure if he was even on the board of directors or a shareholder himself. Ultimately he was an employee, and surely he would have always been aware of this. In the context of 'power struggle' conjecture I'm not sure how much power he actually had to wield relative to the bigger fish at Red Bull. There is another court case due to occur in a few months--if there's an untenable/big-liability aspect to that then it could explain his sudden ouster moreso than presumed power struggles by an employee with relatively little power to struggle with.
venkyhere wrote: ↑01 Aug 2025, 10:11
w.r.t Redbull,
they have erred somewhere in the middle of 2023, whilst designing the RB20 (and have continued the same whilst preparing RB21) , where in the pursuit of performance, they went beyond the point of diminishing returns, and went too far down the path of adding negative performance. In software parlance, they added new/serious bugs whilst administering 'fixes' for minor bugs/deficits.
I agree. I think Adrian's influence, for whatever reason, began to wane around this time (mid 2023). There were a few features on the RB20, whose development would have been ongoing around that time, which seemed slapped-on. The halo inlets with small radiators, the Mercedes type engine cover shoulders; these looked fussy to me, not like a Newey car. Fictional Adrian Newey: "You want to feed little radiators with the highly turbulent boundary layer around the halo?" I'm not even sure if Newey would have suggested the shark mouth inlets, but that is the one feature that stuck and seemed to work, as everyone else bar Alpine ended up adopting it for 2025. 2023 was the first season without Dietrich, and RBAT was taking off with the RB17 project, which may have altered his focus or application within RBR, RBAT, and RBPT. Now I wonder if RB17s will be built at all. There was talk of Newey remain an RBAT employee after he left, is this the case? Would his contract with Aston preclude any further association with Red Bull? AM did work with RB previously of course, on the Valkyrie, and as a sponsor, and built some RBR themed road cars.
