Red Bull Reveals Main Issues Behind Lost Dominance In 2024
Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache has revealed what went wrong with the RB20 in the 2024 season, ending the team's dominance in the ground effect era, which began in 2022.
While Red Bull started the season on a high note, balance problems on the car compromised handling and pace, leading a resurgent McLaren to win the Constructors' Championship, and Ferrari to surpass Red Bull to claim the second spot.
Fortunately for Max Verstappen, the strong early season performance, where he won seven Grands Prix in the first ten races helped him win his fourth championship after a close battle with McLaren's Lando Norris.
The balance problem on the RB20 became more prominent after the summer break, leading the Milton Keynes outfit to accept that Sergio Perez's claims of the car's challenges were true after Verstappen had begun facing them.
Red Bull's performance suffered as the season progressed. Though it eventually took corrective measures, the issue wasn't resolved entirely. Speaking on the situation, Wache told Motorsport.com:
“The season was basically as challenging as we expected. I would say we were more surprised at the beginning of the season because of the gap we had. We expected the whole season to be like the end of the season, a big fight with the others.
“We didn’t expect such a big hole in the middle of the season ourselves, but we did expect a big fight with others.”
Pointing out the main problem, Wache explained the CFD and simulator data did not sync with the car's performance on the racetrack. He explained:
“There are multiple aspects to that story. The first one is the correlation, that the car had some different characteristics than what we expected in terms of aero.
“Another aspect is that we didn’t expect some elements would affect the car performance as much as they did. They were not there by desire, but maybe we didn’t focus enough on them. Those elements were still there at the end of the season and we have to fix them for 2025.
“We had a loss of downforce in some areas of the [downforce] map and therefore we didn’t perform on track as we thought we could based on the wind tunnel, so there were some holes. That is a correlation issue and in terms of delivery on track it was mainly a balance issue.”
Wache revealed that Red Bull identified the problem early in the season but didn't want to upset anything since the RB20 was performing well. However, the problem became a major concern after McLaren gained pace through its effective upgrades. He added:
“I think we spotted it, but after that the car was quick and we didn’t want to modify it massively,” Wache admitted. “When we came back to Europe and were challenged more by McLaren, then it started to become more and more evident that it was one of the biggest issues for us to go quicker.”