Red Bull has conceded that eradicating the kerb-riding weakness with its 2024 car that has hindered its competitiveness in several rounds this season won’t be “easy.”
The Austrian outfit’s dominance under the latest ground effect regulations continued into this term as Max Verstappen claimed four victories in the opening six races.
However, the competition has now closed in and Verstappen has been made to work for wins at Imola, Canada and Spain, while he was beaten in Miami and Monaco.
But while Ferrari, McLaren and Mercedes have made substantial inroads, Red Bull’s advantage has been most threatened at circuits that require a car to absorb kerbs.
Verstappen came home a distant sixth place in Monte Carlo and the Dutchman revealed that the long-standing weakness has been exposed since the grid converged.
With the Dutchman having proclaimed then that it will “take time” to discover a fix, Red Bull Chief Engineer Paul Monaghan has agreed that there is no simple solution.
Asked how tough it will be to dial it out in 2024, Monaghan said: “Ask me at the end of the season or the end of next season as well and I’ll give you a realistic answer.
“It’s not impossible, I don’t know how to offer you an answer to say how difficult is it, if it was easy we might have already done it, [but] it’s not going to be easy.
“The magnitude of the problem, I look at other cars, they don’t know how they ride the kerbs, if it hits something it launches the thing in the air and we do the same.
“The question is can we make a big enough improvement to be quicker than our opposition, that’s the challenge and the answer to that we don’t know.
“We’ve just got to do the best we can in this incremental process race by race, which we’ll see.”
Monaghan assured that Red Bull is not “resting” on its laurels despite boasting sizeable championship leads, as it aims to eliminate possible barriers to performance.
“We intend to try and address any performance limitation in the car, so we don’t do one in deference to another,” Monaghan explained.
“You see the bodywork; you don’t see what we bury inside it if we keep it away from prying eyes.
“That’s an ongoing development and we will chip away in whatever magnitude we can achieve race by race.
“Hungary’s got a few hasn’t it, Austria’s got plenty of kerbs we’ve always enjoyed.
“So again, we’re not resting and again we just have to have a car that rides adequately to get us around the lap if we’re quickest.”
While Verstappen has been able to overcome Red Bull’s recent struggles to collect the wins, Red Bull team-mate Sergio Perez is encountering another slump in form.
The Mexican has added a pitiful eight points across the previous four rounds and attributed his poor eighth-place result in Spain last weekend to balance limitations.
Asked whether it was proving harder to provide the drivers with the balance desired, Monaghan replied: “Again that’s going to be somewhat circuit dependent, isn’t it?
“Is it harder to give the balance they want?
“You could then argue our upgrades haven’t really made us go faster so we’ve got to achieve that in order to get the most out of the car so the intention is no.
“We don’t narrow it unless we really can but this car operates in a window we understand, we don’t seek to shrink it unless the gain is big enough that we will overcome the reduction.
“We’re very used to seeing teams bring a lot of upgrades often and constantly have to evaluate.
“And this team has been at the forefront over the past 15-20 years of pushing that rate of development.”
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