Red Bull the main focus as F1 testing starts

Red Bull will be the focus of attention when Formula 1 pre-season testing starts this week in Bahrain – for reasons both on track and off.

For one thing, the future of team principal Christian Horner is in doubt as a result of an internal investigation being conducted by Red Bull into allegations that the 50-year-old has engaged in inappropriate and controlling behaviour towards a female colleague.

For another, the car Red Bull unveiled at the team’s Milton Keynes base last Thursday was a bit of a “wow” moment, even if chief technical officer Adrian Newey insisted that he did not consider it to be any kind of enormous step forward.

The 10 teams have just three days of testing to prepare for the start of the season and can run only one car at a time. So each driver should have no more than a day and a half to become acquainted with his new car in Bahrain.

Two-time champion Fernando Alonso was bemoaning this at the launch of his Aston Martin car a week or so ago. The Spaniard called the paucity of running “unfair”.

Alonso is guaranteed to be at the centre of attention this season, given the vacancy at Mercedes next season following Lewis Hamilton’s decision to switch to Ferrari. As Alonso put it: “There are three world champions on the grid and I am the only one available.”

But the driver market is a discussion for a little way down the road. Right now, even the stars without a seat for 2025 will be focused more on their new steeds than their futures.

Normally, it is hard to divine a clear picture of relative performance from pre-season testing because of the variables of fuel loads, engine modes, track condition, tyres and so on. But last year, the fact that Red Bull’s RB19 was in a league of its own was clear from pretty much its first serious run.

By the end of the three days last year, the identity of the 2023 world champion was in not even the slightest doubt, even if no-one expected Max Verstappen and Red Bull to produce the most dominant season in F1 history.

The nine other teams – not to mention everyone with an investment in a competitive, exciting world championship in what will be F1’s longest ever season – will be hoping against hope that the same thing does not happen again this week.

The car launches, held over the past two weeks, were notable for one overriding irony. Many of the cars bore a strong resemblance to last year’s Red Bull and incorporated a number of its design features. But the car that looked least like last year’s Red Bull was this year’s Red Bull.

Horner, whose presence at the launch in the context of the allegations surprised many, said: “It’s an evolution of last year’s car but it’s not conservative and you can see the guys have been quite aggressive in certain areas and still pushing the boundaries. And [we are] conscious that our opponents are still going to be pushing very hard.”

The Red Bull maintains the same overall aerodynamic philosophy as before. But Newey and his team have been thinking outside the box.

Red Bull have opened up the sidepod undercut – a crucial part of the design, which guides airflow to the floor edge and rear of the car – even further than before by removing altogether the horizontal cooling duct at its front.

Instead, air intended for the radiators now enters through two narrow vertical slats below the horizontal part of the initial sidepod bodywork. The idea is to free up further space for more air mass to flow down the side of the car – and therefore create more downforce and performance.

Towards the back, the car has two huge tunnels running backwards from the cockpit to the rear of the car. These are reminiscent of a feature on last year’s Mercedes but much more pronounced.

The assumption is that these channel air through the car in a way that not only serves for cooling but ensures it disrupts the downforce-producing external air as little as possible, and probably finds a way to enhance it, as it exits towards the rear.

So, has Newey produced another masterstroke? This may not be immediately obvious – and the hope for a competitive year rests on that. Because if the car is as obviously superior to the rest in testing, as its predecessor was, it promises to be a very long year.

Pre-season is usually when optimism is at its highest among F1 teams. All feel they have done their best over the winter and hope it will enable them to move forward compared to their rivals. That ambition has yet to be tempered by on-track reality.

So it says a lot about the size of the challenge facing anyone not in a Red Bull – “a mountain to climb”, as Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff has put it – that the mood among their rivals is somewhat downbeat.

Few seem under any illusion that the world champions will start the season with an advantage over the field. The questions are: how big will it be and how long will it last?

This belief is based not only on the fact that Red Bull won all but one race last year. But also, as expressed by McLaren team principal Andrea Stella last week, that their car was so dominant that the team were able to stop developing it early on and still keep winning – which will have freed up more development resources for the 2024 design.

The hope is that Red Bull will be closer to the top of the development curve with the regulations and that others, with more to find, will therefore close up as the races tick by.

McLaren were the team to make the most progress in 2023, starting the season close to the back before leaping to join the pack behind Red Bull with a mid-season upgrade – one of the most impressive in-season development steps ever seen in F1. Stella feels that something similar – while starting from a much higher baseline – might again be possible.

“If we keep the development rate we had in 2023, that we will add hopefully on to the 2024 car, I think we can be in a strong position,” he said. “Whether that is enough to challenge Red Bull and the other top teams, we will find out.”

The Red Bull is not the only new car drawing attention. Newey said at his car’s launch that there was an innovation on the Mercedes that he found “interesting” although he would not reveal what it was. The suspicion is that he was referring to the front wing design.

Wolff has described this year’s Mercedes as “complete relaunch”. And it needs to be, because as he admitted himself they “got it wrong with the new regulations” introduced in 2022.

The new Mercedes certainly looks different from their last two unsuccessful designs. And the former champions hope the three days in Bahrain this week will confirm that they have changed the fundamental characteristics of their car.

For the past two years, Hamilton and George Russell complained that the Mercedes was unpredictable and sapped confidence – they never quite knew what it was going to do when they turned it into a corner.

As Wolff put it: “The target is to do a good job, look inwards, try to have the car on track that is predictable and has lots of downforce, to give a car to Lewis and George that they enjoy driving and [is] not as difficult as the previous years. Hopefully in Bahrain we will have more good feedback than bad.”

It’s a similar story at Ferrari, who were Red Bull’s closest competitors at the end of last season.

Three pole positions for Charles Leclerc in the final five races of 2023 were evidence that Ferrari had finally found a way to tame what had started the season as a wilful and vicious car, and made significant progress on performance too. Over the second half of last year, the Ferrari was on average just 0.032 seconds slower than the Red Bull over a qualifying lap.

Their focus over the winter has been on finding a better trade-off between qualifying and race, for even when the Ferrari could outpace the Red Bull over one lap, it would fade over a stint.

Team boss Frederic Vasseur said: “It is always a compromise, but over the [2023] season as a whole the global picture was we were competitive in qualifying and suffering more in the race. We had to focus on the fact the car had to be easier to drive.”

Leclerc said at the launch that the Ferrari simulator suggested the team had made “a significant step forward” on this. But the behaviour of these ground-effect cars with venturi underfloor tunnels is not always easy to simulate in the virtual world.

The paradox of last season was that while Red Bull set new standards in terms of dominance, they did so in a year in which the field spread from front to back was one of the smallest ever – just 1.4 seconds separated the fastest car from the slowest [the Alfa Romeo Sauber] on average in qualifying.

Alonso expects this to be the case again. “It will be very tight,” he says. “There are four or five teams within 0.2-0.3secs this year, I bet. That will put you within 0.2secs fighting for podiums or outside the top 10.”

And that is another reason why it will be so hard to work anything out about the true competitive picture from this week’s running. When margins are so tight, the effect of the inevitable variables of testing is even harder to unpick.

There will be no firm answers by the time testing finishes on Friday evening, only hints. And as the teams prepare for their cars’ first serious running, McLaren’s Lando Norris has probably summed up the situation best so far.

“Are Red Bull beatable?” Norris wondered last week. “You have to say yes, because we were very close at certain times and at certain times we did.

“But the question is: are they beatable over a season? I think that will be very difficult.”