In preparation for the (original) 2020 season, Red Bull toyed with the idea that he might fight for the title. But that’s out of the question now. Red Bull has got into a situation where no director of technical department wants to be. The car does something without anyone knowing why. It behaves differently in the same situations. A nightmare for every designer. Red Bull has a goblin in its new concept of aerodynamics, which it has not yet revealed.
Tags: Red Bull
Technika
Published 18. 07 2020 – Tomáš Richtr
Max Verstappen lost in the qualification for the Hungarian GP over 1.4 seconds to the winner. That’s awfully much. The ‘package’ is a little brother against it. Teammate Alexander Albon, already under pressure to cope with Verstappen, is no longer giving up the situation at all, and in Hungary he is losing another half second or more. In the middle of the Q2 qualification, even Williams George Russell was faster. Because Russell and Albon are close to each other, in response to a question from reporters, Rusell said he felt sorry for Albon and that Red Bull thought Albon looked like an “idiot.”
The F1 journalism environment works by asking Max Verstappen about Goerge Russell’s reaction at the earliest opportunity.
“He knows nothing about our car and should focus on his own.” Typical Verstappen reaction. But he himself admitted that he did not know exactly what the problem was in the car.
Red Bull may end if he loses Verstappen
The Red Bull RB16 has some gimmicks in its aerodynamics concept. The degree of unpredictability of the car’s behavior is unusually massive. This is due to the loss of the expected behavior of air currents or eddies in the elementary spaces of the car surfaces or in its immediate vicinity. For this year, Red Bull has reached for a new concept of aerodynamics in the front of the car to make it work better in slow corners.
During the weekend at the Hungaroring, Verstappen shows how the car under his hands sometimes does what he doesn’t want or doesn’t expect. And with the loss of confidence in the car, the speed continues to fall very rapidly, because it is necessary not to break it. The car is “nervous” in the sense that it does not behave consistently. In one wheel it works aerodynamically, but in the next it in some parts of the car the air flow may stop working according to “construction – design – expectations”. This is the moment when the car stops holding on to the track.
Technical director Adrian Newey has experience with such goblins, as he eventually described extensively in his book. So it is possible that with some minor adjustment, Red Bull will achieve “calming” of the car and benefit from the idea it is implementing for this year. But he must first understand the cause of his problems. And that has not happened to date.
