Red Bull has unveiled its 2024 Formula 1 contender ,the RB20, which seems to incorporate design concepts Mercedes had previously rejected.
Reigning world champions Red Bull Racing unveiled their 2024 Formula 1 contender in a livestream launch event at their Milton Keynes headquarters in a bid to reaffirm their dominance from the previous two seasons.
Red Bull Racing looks forward to the 2024 F1 season basking in the euphoria of the team’s tactical brilliance and Max Verstappen’s individual dominance last season which guaranteed victory in both the constructor and driver titles.
The unveiling confirmed that the new car will retain the classic Red Bull colour scheme for 2024, although the renderings conceal a number of significant features, such as the floor’s edge and other aerodynamic elements.
“This is a momentous year in the Team’s history,” Team Principal and CEO Christian Horner said. “Over the past 20 years, Red Bull has succeeded in changing the landscape of Formula One and it has done it by being determined to do things differently, by being committed to playing hard and racing even harder and by being utterly focused on competing for the biggest prizes in the sport.
“We’ve been lucky enough to do that on multiple occasions and seven Drivers’ titles, six Constructors’ Championship wins and 113 race victories to date demonstrate the success of Red Bull’s vision for the Team.
“The latest chapter of that story starts today with the RB20. It’s going to be a thrilling and hugely competitive season but as we saw last year, this is a Team operating at the peak of its powers and in Max and Checo we have two drivers who can deliver at every circuit, in any conditions.
“So I’m confident that, just as we have done for the past 20 years, we can compete for podiums, wins and hopefully more championships.”
All nine rival teams have conferred about their development, but at the same time, a sense of relativism has taken hold, given that their success is contingent upon what Red Bull, the dominant force of the ground-effect era, has to provide this time around.
Three-time world champion Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez will pilot the RB20 which is a successor of the all-conquering RB19. Remarkably, the two race drivers performed a few laps on the wet Silverstone course earlier this week as part of the team’s shakedown.
The RB20 that was unveiled on Thursday has extensive cooling gulleys that run backwards from the halo along the length of its engine cover, as was evident in the spy photos taken at Silverstone during Red Bull’s shakedown runs on Tuesday.
This design seems to be pretty similar to the one used on the Mercedes W14 2023 car although the Silver Arrows abandoned their “zeropod” sidepod design in favor of Red Bull’s widely-adopted downwash concept.
The launch specification of the RB20, which Red Bull is scheduled to run at the Bahrain test next week and the season opener next month, appears to share a lot more similarities with the W14. However, team CEO Christian Horner did not rule out changes in that timeframe when asked about such a possibility.
The RB20 which went on display on Thursday, also looks to sport a vertical sidepod radiator inlet under even more deeply undercut sidepods than the RB19. The Mercedes’ first “zeropod” car was the first model to feature this.
The RB20’s nose and other front-end components resemble those Red Bull had adopted at the end of the previous season, but it does still have the downwash sidepod concepts further down.
The floor which is mounted beneath the RB20 is notably larger and less complicated than the intricate and integral Venturi tunnel floors required to comply with existing F1 ground-effect regulations.
This is probably a ploy to hide the car’s most significant aerodynamic features from rival teams as long as possible before 2024 testing starts.
The RB20’s much-discussed Mercedes-like components beneath its sidepods may also be a ploy to cause confusion, similar to what happened when the previously Alfa Romeo-branded squad released launch photos of their 2023 car with a fictitious floor edge last year.
“It’s an evolution of last year’s car, obviously, and it’s our 20th version,” Horner said speaking at the RB20’s launch. “The guys haven’t been sitting still, it’s not conservative, and you can see they’ve been quite aggressive in certain areas and still pushing the boundaries.
“I’m conscious that our opponents are still pushing very hard and I’ve seen a few cars that have been released that look similar in theme to what we launched with last year.
“You can see that all the men and women behind the scenes have been working very hard [on the RB20] and some of the detail on the car is absolutely exquisite.”
