F1 News: No More Major Upgrades On RB19 F1 Car Says Red Bull Boss

A limitation with the wind tunnel time has caused the team to reconsider their priorities.

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has revealed plans for the RB19 upgrades for the second half of the season. The car attracted a lot of eyeballs at the Belgian GP after receiving an entirely new sidepod package and a few other modifications for improved cooling. 

However, Horner states that the recent upgrade was the last major upgrade to go on the car. Going forward, RB19 will continue to receive circuit-specific upgrades only. This is mainly owing to the cost cap penalty in the form of a 10% reduction in wind tunnel time the team attracted for breaking the cost cap in 2021.

As a result, Horner said that the team was utilizing the available wind tunnel time to focus on the 2024 car. He said:

“I think there’s circuit-specific bits and pieces [upgrades for this year] because we race at Monza, and other circuits like Singapore, they’re all circuit specific.

"With the limitation with the wind tunnel time that we have, we have to make our choices and so of course we’re having to put a lot of focus into next year now to make sure that we don’t fall behind.

"Because the others, you can see McLaren have made a big step, we’re expecting others to do likewise later in the year, particularly with the extra time they have available to them.

"With a handicap that we have, we have to really swing our focus over to next year because we have a significant deficit in wind tunnel time compared to our competitors and we have to be very selective in how we use them.

"We’ll have a few circuit-specific things but nothing that hasn’t been done already or committed through the research and development.”

In addition to the cost cap penalty, Red Bull also gets a reduction in wind tunnel time for being World Champions. Must be fair enough.