RB has revealed that the changes it made to its floor as part of its Formula 1 upgrade package for the Spanish Grand Prix “decoupled” its car and led to the team’s recent slump in form.
The team, which was a regular points contender in the early part of the season, brought a significant upgrade package to Barcelona but found performance lacking as both drivers exited Q1 and finished out of the points on that Sunday.
Now, the team’s technical director Jody Egginton has revealed that the floor changes made had led to the drop in performance.
“We had an update targeting certain benefits,” Egginton told Autosport.
“We’re still trying to get all the headline load improvements, but we were focusing a little bit still to get a bit more brake entry stability, a bit more rotation in the car, all the normal things.
“As a package, it was clear that we hadn’t been able to extract everything from it, and although the load that we anticipated was there, we’d sort of decoupled the car in through-corner and through-speed balance more than we wanted.”
The team ran a mixture of parts in Austria as it sought to unearth its struggles, an experiment aided by the extra parc ferme window afforded by the sprint race format.
“So we took the decision immediately to roll one car back and do a back-to-back in Austria – it was a two-stage experiment because the parc ferme window this year in sprint races opens up twice,” Egginton explained.
“We had two goes at it, bottomed it out. And then for Silverstone, we had a baseline aero config and essentially we’d rolled back the floor.”
Despite the setback, the team was happy with some of the changes it made to the floor, just not the package as a whole.
“The floor is a one-piece thing with bits of it we liked, bits of it we didn’t. You don’t get the choice to split it up,” he revealed.
“You bring the update to the first event, you’ve got things you want to learn, but we delved straight into it, did our washing, found the answer and moved on. So I’m quite happy with the process.
“Clearly not happy that we couldn’t access all the performance we had, which is far better than not actually realising the performance. But yeah, we’ve converged to a configuration now.
“A lot of learning from that floor that we’re not running, which we’ll apply to the next floor because some aspects of it we like.”
Egginton doesn’t seem concerned about the team’s upgrade misstep and says rolling back upgrades is a natural part of a car’s development cycle.
“Most teams have [rolled back] at one point or another,” he admitted.
“To believe that you can attain everything is naive – if you’re trying to develop this aggressively, it’s just how it is.
“I’d be concerned if every single part got retained! I’d question that as ‘are we sure, do we want to look at that again?’ Because experimentally the likelihood of that is low.”
With its upgrade issues untangled, RB will be hoping for a strong second half of the season. The team currently sits sixth in the Constructor’s Championship, with a slender lead over Haas in seventh.
