The Formula 1 season is just three races old and Red Bull Racing and Max Verstappen are favourites to do the title double for a second consecutive year.
The RB19 has burst from the blocks with blistering pace in 2023 and looks well placed to dominate the campaign.
It’s important to acknowledge Red Bull Racing hasn’t lucked into this position. What we’ve so far witnessed is the work of a design team in a rich vein of form and a race team firing on all cylinders.
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Dominant seasons are what every team aims for, and Milton Keynes should be allowed to enjoy the achievement.
Sergio Pérez might also provide us with a battle for the drivers championship. It only takes two drivers to make for an entertaining season; here’s hoping the Mexican can live up to the billing.
But while it’s all good news for RBR, it’s fair to say that its would-be rivals have come up painfully short. Given everyone started from zero under new rules at the start of last year and given that Ferrari’s 2022 campaign showed great promise undone by unreliability, it wasn’t unreasonable to think the frontrunning pack could close up this year. Instead we’ve been let down.
So how is it that Red Bull Racing has ended up so far ahead, and what’s gone wrong for everyone else?
THE RB19 IS THE COMPLETE PACKAGE
Carlos Sainz helpfully summed up Red Bull Racing’s strengths at the end of last month.
“At the moment the Red Bull is superior everywhere,” he said.
“It’s superior in quali, in the race, in straight-line speed, they are superior in medium (to) low-speed corners, they are superior with tyre management, over the kerbs and bumps.”
Quite the comprehensive list.
The car’s advantage can be split into two key areas.
The first is the aerodynamic philosophy, a field in which Red Bull Racing has set the trend, evidenced by the number of teams following in its wake this season despite last year’s more diverse field.
That Ferrari and Mercedes have stuck to alternative approaches and ended up slower underlines the point.
The model has allowed RBR to unlock great aerodynamic efficiency, meaning the car is able to carry more downforce before drag starts to become too big a problem.
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The much talked about DRS advantage points to this. When the DRS flap opens, it’s dumping so much downforce and relative drag that the car can breeze past others as if it were in a different category, to borrow Lewis Hamilton’s words.
But the second crucial component is vehicle dynamics. It’s the RB19’s suspension platform that’s enabling the drivers to access all that performance all the time.
The RB19 operates on a very stable platform. It’s doesn’t dive or squat or roll through corners, but it also isn’t so stiff that it becomes skittish and unpredictable. It also has quite a wide set-up window — Pérez’s says the car can now be tailored to his driving style as much as Verstappen’s.
That’s partly because the car has been built to be at its best in the race, when fuel loads, temperature, tyre choice and other factors fluctuate over 90 minutes compared to the relatively controlled environment of a single qualifying lap. While Mercedes and Ferrari have come close to snatching pole over the first three rounds, no-one has come close in racing conditions.
It’s an understated achievement given a key part of this rule set was to ban some of the more expensive sophisticated suspension tricks. That Red Bull Racing has been able to recapture some of that functionality is of great credit to the team.
That goes some way to explaining part of RBR’s advantage. What’s gone wrong to the other teams explains the rest.
FERRARI’S FLAWS
At the start of last season, before Ferrari had to turn down its engine to protect reliability, it had arguably the fastest car in the sport.
Relative to Red Bull Racing its strength was agility through and acceleration out of the turns. Its weakness was top speed.
Rectifying that balance was the brief for the SF-23, and the team was convinced it had nailed its targets. It ended up with a car that was more of a handful in the bends, but it assumed that was down to rule tweaks around the floor that would affect everyone equally.
“We thought that this was normal and the car would become a bit more peaky,” Sainz explained. “We got to the first test and we immediately saw people haven’t suffered from the change of regulations, they are much quicker than last year, and this left us thinking whether we have something that we didn’t get right.
“Our analysis from the first few races is there’s no fundamental issue with the car. It’s just a very peaky car, very unpredictable car in the race.”
But you can’t really separate speed from driveability. Mercedes was absolutely convinced last year that it had the fastest car on paper, but it never found a sustainable way to set it up to access that performance in real life.
It’s a realisation that appears to have dawned on Sainz.
“Clearly, as the cars have developed, the capacity of development of the Red Bull direction is a lot higher than the capacity of development of our project,” he said.
“The extremely good performance at the start of last season made us keep pushing with this concept, with this project of car, but I think we realise now that Red Bull has a clear advantage everywhere and that we need to start looking to our right and to our left.”
But team principal Frédéric Vasseur doesn’t agree.
“On our side we have the feeling — and I hope that we are right and we are going in the right direction — that we have still tons of room for improvement on the car,” he said, per The Race.
“As long as we are still able to develop the car to get points on the aero, to get a better balance, to get a better stability and so on, I think it makes sense to push in this direction.”
Partly Ferrari doesn’t really have a choice. While aerodynamics can be revolutionised to a point, changing suspension geometry and other elements affecting vehicle dynamics is the sort of thing that can only be done between seasons, particularly in the era of the cost cap and development limitations.
All hope for Ferrari this season hangs on a heavy stream of updates Vasseur says will arrive at most of the races between now and the Spanish Grand Prix at the start of June. If there’s no perceptible improvement, presumably slates will have to be wiped clean for next year’s car.
WHY MERCEDES HAS SLIPPED BACKWARDS
If Ferrari is still asking itself whether it’s arrived at a dead-end street, Mercedes is already backing out at speed and looking for another route.
The team confirmed during the first weekend of the season that it was throwing this year’s car in the bin and starting fresh. The first components of that redesign are due next month.
It’s in this position because it doubled down on last year’s troubled car after winning the Brazilian Grand Prix, taking the one-two finish as a sign it was on the right track.
“It got better and better and better (last year),” team boss Toto Wolff told Autosport. “We were competitive in the American races. We won in Interlagos.
“That was the perfect storm for us. It wasn’t good for 2023. We thought we were on the right track and the concept works. But it didn’t.”
The team has finally accepted that it can’t get the car to work in the way it was designed to. Wolff has said an alternative design is already in the wind tunnel and producing impressive numbers.
But the problem is larger than just aerodynamic concept.
The novel philosophy required a novel chassis, which is one of Hamilton’s major gripes.
“We sit closer to the front wheels than all the other drivers,” he said. “When you’re driving, you feel like you’re sitting on the front wheels, which is one of the worst feelings when you’re driving a car.
“What that does is it just really changes the attitude of the car and how you perceive its movement. It makes it harder to predict compared to when you’re further back and you’re sitting closer, more centre.”
Cockpit position affects where the crash structures are positioned, which affects weight distribution, which affects the packaging of the power unit. In short, it can’t be changed without a wholesale chassis reinvention, which won’t come until next year.
It means the team is stuck with some of the key design cues on this year’s abandoned car, the hangover from which is going to stick around until at least the end of the season.
THE INTERESTING CASE OF ASTON MARTIN
But if that all sounds a bit hopeless, consider Aston Martin’s place among the frontrunners, up from seventh last year.
On the dynamics side the car appears very sweet to handle — you only have to look at the way Fernando Alonso has been thrashing it to know he feels very comfortable taking it to the limit. That Lance Stroll has been able to stay relatively close is another good sign the car inspires confidence.
The AMR23 has only one major weakness relative to the RB19, and that’s top speed. The car has plenty of downforce after switching streams last year to the Red Bull Racing philosophy, but it just isn’t efficient enough to catch up. What this means for slower street tracks like Monaco, though, where drag counts for less, will be very interesting.
If you’re looking for a glimmer of hope this season, you might find it here.
Assuming that Aston Martin is on the right development path to get to the front eventually, consider that the aerodynamic testing restrictions will work in its favour this year.
The equalisation measures in Formula 1 mean that the lower you finish in the championship, the more wind tunnel time you get.
Because Aston Martin finished seventh last year, it enjoys almost 60 per cent more development time than Red Bull Racing until the end of June.
If it’s still second in the standings on 30 June, that disparity will shrink to just over 19 per cent.
Red Bull Racing won’t be standing still of course, but that’s an enormous opportunity to at least reduce the deficit, even if turning it over completely feels like a bridge too far.
And if nothing else, that should give us a little bit of hope for next season, by which time Mercedes and Ferrari might finally have got their sums right too.
