Adrian Newey was concerned after the first signs of falling performance at Red Bull, but no one at Red Bull seemed particularly worried about it themselves.
Did Red Bull underestimate the problems with their car in the 2024 Formula 1 season? At least that’s what designer Adrian Newey’s statements suggest, who had looked at the first signs with concern, but hadn’t noticed it in others on the team.
Red Bull had also started the 2024 season with a dominant car after 2023, their most dominant season ever. But as the spring progressed, the RB20’s big lead suddenly disappeared.
In Miami, Max Verstappen’s winning streak, who had always crossed the finish line first until then (except when he retired in Australia), was broken. While many initially thought this was an outlier because Lando Norris got support from the safety car, it soon became apparent that the competition had caught up.
“McLaren and Ferrari had developed their cars very well,” Newey had to admit to auto motor und sport in retrospect. The designer, who has since left the team for Aston Martin, had already recognized by the end of 2023 that the car was becoming increasingly difficult to drive.
Even then, the gap between Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez was already widening noticeably. “Max could handle it. It wasn’t his thing, but he could handle it – and Checo couldn’t,” says Newey.
“So you could already see a difference in performance between teammates Max and Checo at the end of 2023. This has also carried over into the start of the 2024 season,” said Newey, because the RB20 was only a further development of the successful RB19.
At the beginning of the season, however, the car was still fast enough to hide the problems. “But that was something I started to worry about,” he says. At Red Bull itself, however, this did not seem to be the case: “Not many others on the team seemed very concerned about it.”
“From the outside looking in, I don’t know, this is not meant as a criticism, but at Red Bull, perhaps due to a lack of experience, they just continued in the same direction,” said the designer, who had already stopped the day-to-day work at the time due to his impending departure.
“And the problem became more and more acute, to the point where even Max found it difficult to drive.”
The Dutchman went on to become world champion in the end, but Red Bull itself dropped to third place in the constructors’ championship.