Red Bull Chief Engineer Paul Monaghan has explained how learning the “complete behaviour” of its RB21 car has helped the team rediscover its winning ways in Formula 1.
The Milton Keynes-based squad undoubtedly suffered by comparison to its own high standards, with Max Verstappen having taken only two Grand Prix victories up until September.
But after the Dutch Grand Prix, in which Verstappen finished a very distant second behind Oscar Piastri, the team was able to unlock more from its much-maligned machine.
Verstappen took dominant wins in Italy and Azerbaijan, and was able to finish second in Singapore, a circuit of a higher downforce nature, which has been the RB21’s Achilles’ heel.
Speaking at the Marina Bay Circuit, Monaghan spoke of the car’s improvement and speculated how well it can compete on similar circuits between now and the season’s end.
“The car is better,” he told media including Motorsport Week.
“Now the question is, can we challenge the previous order from the high-downforce circuits? We’ll have a go, see how we get on. It should be a bit better. The question is, how much?”
The team has revealed that it will produce one more upgrade to the RB21 before the season’s end, a pivot from the rest of the grid’s usual halt of progress, as focus shifts towards next year’s brand-new radical set of technical regulations.
Monaghan discussed the “subtle” changes it has already made, and how the next and final one will be similar, with the hope of propelling Verstappen to more wins.
“We hope to extract a bit more lap time from it,” Monaghan explained. “It’s a subtle revision.
“But as the last one was released [for Zandvoort], more evidence became clear: ‘Oh, we could do this and we could do that.’
“A little bit of capacity was available, so we’ve gone ahead and pushed the button and said, ‘Yeah, we’ll bring that.’
“It should be the last one for this year. There might be some flap trims for Vegas or something like that, as usual.
“But otherwise, yeah, it’s a little bit of performance, and some great work in the factory, and we’ve got it here.”
Red Bull improvements ‘what we expected’ as F1 season nears conclusion
Monaghan explained that the work that has gone into the RB21 has produced, by all accounts, a trajectory of improvement that has been somewhat on target with what was expected.
“We delivered pretty much what we expected,” he commented.
“There was nothing in there, which sort of said, ‘Oh, my goodness me, look, this is so much better than we expected’.
“It’s behaved itself. What we are getting on top of is the complete behaviour of the car.
“We’ve learned things, we found things, and the combination of the new aero parts or new bodywork surfaces, plus some other stuff, it’s a combination of many little changes, not just one, and we picked up a little bit of pace.
“It’s not massive if you look at lap time isolation over a 60-lap race; it can look a little bit daunting, but corner by corner, it’s really small.”
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