Uncovered: Red Bull’s correlation issues with ‘perfect storm’ identified

Thomas Maher
Max Verstappen, Red Bull, 2024 Italian Grand Prix.

Red Bull's development of the RB20 went awry during 2024, but the team managed to turn thingss around towards season end.

Red Bull’s F1 2024 season was in danger of falling apart as the development of the RB20 went awry, but diligent work turned things around towards year-end.

After a dominant start to the season saw Max Verstappen win four of the first six races, Red Bull’s RB20 slowly but surely went off the boil through the middle part of the year, only for the Milton Keynes-based squad to get to grips with its issues in the final races.

Christian Horner praises Max Verstappen after ‘something had changed’

After the first quarter of the season, which had hinted at the season being a repeat of Red Bull’s dominant 2023 display, wins became more and more difficult for Verstappen. While he took wins in Canada and Spain, it was clear McLaren’s MCL38 had become the more versatile machine, and Verstappen duly went on a winless streak.

Indeed, 10 race weekends passed without Verstappen taking the chequered flag first in a Grand Prix, although there were numerous second places and a Sprint victory at the United States GP.

With the RB20’s performance slumping to a dangerous level, with the toughest weekend being at Monza as neither Verstappen nor Sergio Perez troubled the top five, a fourth consecutive Verstappen title seemed likely to slip away.

But a calm Red Bull squad took a step back on the development front, and showed up with a revised floor and engine cover for the United States Grand Prix. The parts had an instant effect on the poise and balance of the RB20, with Verstappen immediately becoming a contender for race wins again.

Winning convincingly in Sao Paulo proved the decisive blow in the championship, while he followed it up with a further victory in Qatar to top off his season.

Speaking to PlanetF1.com in an exclusive interview looking back over the season, Red Bull team boss Christian Horner said the issues had been vast to the point where there had been a feeling within the walls at Milton Keynes that something fundamental had changed.

“There’s never one silver bullet,” he said of where he felt things had gone astray.

“We started the season incredibly strongly with 1-2 finishes at the first two races, pole positions, winning sprint races by 20 seconds in China, and so on.

“Then from, I would say, Imola, life started to become more difficult. Certainly, Miami was probably a turning point. We still should have won the race in Miami without the Safety Car.

“We managed to win at Imola, we managed to win in Spain, we managed to win in Montreal, but they were all tough, hard-fought wins.

“By that point, McLaren had the faster car, and we were starting to see correlation issues between tunnel and track. It almost felt like something had changed – to be so dominant in the first four or five races, and then to have suddenly not one team, but three teams, make a significant step. So it felt like something had changed.

“But the team worked hard to understand the issues that weren’t correlating between what we were seeing in the virtual world and on track.”

With the equipment available to Red Bull no longer translating completely, and the trust in its data being eroded, Red Bull had to rely more on the feedback of its World Champion driver.

“At that point, you rely very heavily on your driver feedback because, when your tools aren’t correlating and making sense, the biggest sensor that you’ve got is the driver, and that’s where Max really stepped up,” Horner said.

“He put in a huge amount of time with the engineers to give his feedback that didn’t correlate with some of the tools, but it was his feedback that we trusted, and then that started to unwrap some of the issues.”

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Red Bull boss Christian Horner at the 2024 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
Red Bull team boss Christian Horner speaks with PlanetF1.com’s Thomas Maher at the 2024 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

With Red Bull now in the process of building its brand-new wind tunnel, the shortfalls of the old one became noticeable throughout F1 2024. Having been labelled a “Cold War relic” by Horner, he explained how the aging infrastructure had combined with other factors to bring about the development issues.

“Yeah, I think that it’s probably a perfect storm,” he said.

“Obviously, as you’re starting to push the limits of the regulations with the stability, the gains become quite finite.

“I think that perhaps we reached some of the limitations of our tunnel. It almost felt like something had changed with the tyres at one point, such was the difference but we know everybody has the same tyres.

“Pirelli was obviously pretty insistent that that hadn’t happened. So we just kept beavering away and working hard at it.

“By the time we arrived in Austin to get the pole for the Sprint, and win the Sprint – we should have had pole for the race, and we finished third in the Grand Prix… even in Singapore, we were taking some steps towards addressing some of those issues.”

That step back on developments, being willing to sacrifice some outright downforce and load in order to refind some stability was key to securing the championship, according to Horner.

“It was vital because I think, by the time we were at Monza, there were still a lot of races to go and we were not in a good position,” he said, believing that the team – who were beaten in the Constructors’ Championship by McLaren and Ferrari – has got a firmer handle on where things went wrong to ensure the same doesn’t happen with this year’s RB21.

“I think we’ve got a much better understanding, and that the lessons that we’ve learned in the latter part of this year will, hopefully, translate into addressing some of those issues.”

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