Red Bull started the season where it left off in 2023 by winning the first four races by healthy margins, but at the last few Grands Prix that has been slashed significantly.
Max Verstappen has been under threat twice from Lando Norris and McLaren at both the Spanish and Austrian Grands Prix, with the pair colliding at the latter causing Verstappen to lose a race win at Red Bull’s home circuit.
At the recent weekend at Silverstone, Red Bull suffered another defeat when it failed to get on top of the wet conditions leading to mistakes by both Verstappen and teammate Sergio Perez during qualifying which put them further down the grid for the race.
Verstappen tried to reel in the leaders after making a good tyre choice in the final laps, but Norris and eventual winner Lewis Hamilton were fast enough to hold off the threat from Red Bull.
The RB20 has been the benchmark package to beat for F1 teams, it now appears that McLaren has overtaken them in raw performance and Mercedes is threatening to do the same. Journalist Michael Schmidt believes the team broke a ‘golden rule’ when adding updates to their aero package when speaking on the Formel Schmidt podcast.
Red Bull broke ‘golden rule’ with RB20 updates
Even though Red Bull has consistently brought updates to its car in the last couple of races, they have not worked as intended for the Milton Keynes squad.
The team has been struggling with a key component on their floor, having brought six configurations that have not produced the numbers expected.
Schmidt explains that Red Bull stepped over the line with its upgrades and has potentially reached a performance ceiling with its current package.
“In this generation of car you can hardly get anything from the underbody unless you run it lower. The teams are talking about half a millimetre where you go even lower,” said Schmidt.
“But the lower you go it’s almost like a golden rule; the greater the instability in the car and that certainly happened at Red Bull, and also happened with a few others when things get bad and there is a lot of bouncing and rocking of the car.”
Red Bull’s went radical with RB20 for more performance
Part of the reason why Red Bull adopted an aggressive aerodynamic package with the RB20 is because they wanted to unlock more performance from the dominant RB19.
The team felt it risked hitting a performance ceiling by staying with the same concept, so went for a car design that resembles the zero sidepods on the Mercedes W13 with its small side intakes.
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Questions will be asked if they are unable to extract more performance from their car, especially with the departure of Adrian Newey set for the end of the season.
McLaren and Mercedes are set to bring more upgrades before the summer break, putting further pressure on Red Bull as they look the weakest since the beginning of the current regulation set in 2022.
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