Newey offers secrets to genius behind Red Bull’s F1 car design
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The Red Bull design guru followed up the already dominant RB18 with the superior RB19, which has won 20 of the 21 grands prix so far this year, enabling the team to successfully defend both world championship titles at a canter. And Newey has revealed some of the key attributes behind Red Bull’s record-breaking championship season in an interview with BBC Sport. “F1 is clearly not about one person, and developing the engineering team and working with that team has also been a huge satisfaction,” Newey said. Newey insisted Red Bull “fully expected this year that everything would close up” but added “we managed to get the fundamentals of the car right”. “The good thing about that was it allowed us to take an evolutionary approach, to understand the strengths and weaknesses of last year’s car and try to address that appropriately,” he continued. “We have managed to read regulations changes well and come back with a car we can then evolve.”
Weight loss was a key area of focus over the winter for improving Red Bull’s 2023 challenger. “Weight loss was part of it,” Newey explained. “We never managed to get down to the weight limit last year. Related ‘Unwell’ Ocon absent from F1 Abu Dhabi GP media day Schumacher’s next career move revealed with switch to Alpine“By the end of the season, we were still significantly over, so much more detail through the winter to get the weight off, and then the rest was primarily aerodynamic refinement.”It’s all about trying to condition the flow to give the best performance to the underbody. Most of what you see is as always to control the front-wheel wake, which in any open-wheel racing car is a big thing, and maximising the shape of the underside is the key to the whole thing.”Asked whether he can see the airflow, Newey replied: “No, of course not.”I can picture it. And if I try to be objective, that’s perhaps one of my strengths – that I can actually picture things well in my mind’s eye.”
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