Red Bull has quashed the notion that its 2024 Formula 1 car has turned into a “diva”, despite Max Verstappen’s recent remonstrations about the handling of the RB20.
The Austrian squad started the ongoing season as it ended the previous term as the dominant side with four victories in the opening five races and three 1-2 finishes.
However, Red Bull has endured more trouble since as the grid has converged and both McLaren and Mercedes have shown stronger pace across the latest weekends.
Along with regressing in competitiveness relative to the competition, Verstappen, who hasn’t won in four races, has lamented the RB20 becoming a harder car to drive.
The Dutchman has insisted that Red Bull has greater pressing concerns with its package than team-mate Sergio Perez, who has laboured to 28 points in eight rounds.
But Red Bull Chief Engineer Paul Monaghan is certain it hasn’t made vast changes to the car’s characteristics with the upgrades it has brought since the surging start.
“That’s a question we’ve posed to ourselves a few times, as you may well imagine,” Monaghan pondered when the topic was brought to him in Belgium.
“A surprisingly small amount has altered in terms of our car. The characteristics, as you have often hear us engineering types talk about, haven’t really altered.
“We have revised the bodywork a few times, putting more load into it, trying to make it more efficient.
There’s nothing we see that in our research tools or what we bring back from running, which says we’ve made it worse or we’ve missed our targets.
“But it doesn’t mean that we can’t look again and be thorough to say, is the car actually better?
“Or have we rearranged it a bit with a similar last time, and just made it more difficult?
“So that’s an ongoing process. Whatever we find is subtle, it’s not gargantuan. It’s not to say, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve made an absolute mess of this or that’.
“It’s chipping away for a few tenths per lap, and if you then take, say, an average circuit with 15 corners –
if we miss one or two-tenths, if you look at that distributed around the lap, it’s minutiae.
“So I don’t think there’s anything we’ve done to make the car particularly bad.”
Red Bull boss Christian Horner has conceded that the squad’s car under its current guise boasts a narrower operating window than McLaren’s more versatile MCL38.
However, Monaghan has denied that the RB20 has become a ‘diva’, a term that Mercedes has used to describe previous cars that have been quick but unpredictable.
“No, I wouldn’t describe our car like that,” he retorted.
“Some of the driver comments – good, bad, whether it’s bits they like or bits they don’t like, I would say, have been with our car most races, if not all.
“As such, it’s not an unpredictable one when it comes to the circuit. We know what we might get and, as such,
we have things in our preparation to try and alleviate those and extract more from it.
“I don’t know what characteristics Mercedes was describing when they said their car was a diva, I don’t think ours is, no.”
