Red Bull’s technical team, led by director Pierre Wache, have pulled back the curtain on the strides they’ve made with their car during the F1 winter break.
The Milton Keynes-based outfit, who have clinched the constructors’ title six times, faced a turbulent 2024 season after dominating in previous years. Last term, they were toppled from the top spot, grappling with the tricky RB20, a car that proved difficult to tame.
While Max Verstappen managed to secure his drivers’ championship, the Red Bulls couldn’t maintain their constructors’ dominance. Sergio Perez’s struggles, marked by inconsistent results and a steep drop-off in form at age 35, saw them slide to third in the standings, trailing McLaren and Ferrari.
However, towards the end of the campaign, the team began to unravel the RB20’s weaknesses, setting the stage for a major leap forward.
Wache has said the new RB21, unveiled in its early-season spec, is a notable step up. “Last year we did a patch, I would say,” the 50-year-old Frenchman explained.
He revealed the RB21 is “roughly” three to four-tenths of a second per lap quicker than the final RB20 version raced at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. “A patch to reduce the potential a bit, make it a little bit wider, but it was a small patch. Now we did the full concept of the car in this direction.”
Despite this optimism, the Red Bull cars hit a bump during pre-season testing in Bahrain. Reliability woes curtailed their track time, leaving them uncertain about their place in the 2025 pecking order. Some lingering issues from 2024, particularly a front-to-rear balance disconnect, haven’t been fully resolved. This stemmed from a mismatch between their wind tunnel data and on-track performance, a problem rooted in their ageing development tools.
The Red Bulls’ wind tunnel, in use since they entered F1 in 2005, is now 70 years old, a “Cold War relic,” as team principal Christian Horner has called it. While rivals like Ferrari and McLaren have benefitted from modern facilities, the Red Bulls are still relying on outdated equipment. The good news? A new wind tunnel is on the horizon, though the RB21 was designed in the old one.
Wache admitted the challenges: “I’m not confident,” he said about fully overcoming the correlation issues. “But, at some point, you have to use the tools you have and take all the information you can to make some decision.”
He added, “We still have, and I think everybody has… not correlation, but you need some extrapolation of what will happen in your tools to the track. It is a part of the engineering job we are doing.”
For the Red Bull team, it’s about maximising what they can control. “The confidence is, I don’t think it is 100 percent, but it is not a show stopper,” Wache continued. “You have to use what you know, what you control, and make sure that the extrapolation works as much as possible.”
The 2025 season kicks off with the Australian Grand Prix on March 16, where the Red Bulls will tackle 58 laps of Melbourne’s 5.278-kilometre Albert Park circuit. Fans will be watching closely to see if this speed boost can propel them back to the front of the grid.
