F1 pre-season testing: Red Bull's main focus as teams prepare for the new season

Red Bull will be in the spotlight for both on-track and off-track reasons when F1 pre-season testing begins in Bahrain this week.

First, team principal Christian Horner's future has been put in doubt following an internal investigation carried out by Red Bull into allegations that the 50-year-old had engaged in inappropriate and controlling behavior towards a female colleague. ing.

The other thing is that the car that Red Bull unveiled at the team's Milton Keynes home base last Thursday, even though chief technology officer Adrian Newey insists he doesn't think it's a big step forward. , it was a bit of a “wow” moment.

The 10 teams will undergo just three days of testing in preparation for the start of the season, but only one car will be on the road at a time. Therefore, it should take each driver no more than a day and a half to get used to his new car in Bahrain.

Two-time champion Fernando Alonso lamented this at the Aston Martin car launch a week ago. The Spaniard called the lack of running “unfair.”

Given that Lewis Hamilton's decision to move to Ferrari will leave a vacant seat at Mercedes next season, Alonso is sure to be the center of attention this season. As Alonso said, “There are three world champions on the grid, but I'm the only one available.”

However, we will discuss the driver market a little later. For now, even the stars who don't have seats for 2025 will be focusing on their new horses rather than their own futures.

Variables such as fuel load, engine mode, road conditions and tires typically make it difficult to predict relative performance clearly from pre-season testing. But last year, the fact that Red Bull's RB19 was in a league of its own was evident from almost its first real run.

Even if no one expected Max Verstappen and Red Bull to produce the most dominant season in F1 history, by the end of last year's three days there was little doubt as to the identity of the 2023 world champion. There wasn't.

The other nine teams, not to mention all those investing in a competitive and exciting World Championship, the longest season in F1 history, will be hoping it doesn't happen again this week.

A crucial irony stood out at the car launches held over the past two weeks. Many of the cars looked very similar to last year's Red Bull and incorporated many of its design features. However, the car that looked the least like last year's Red Bull was this year's Red Bull.

Horner, who attended the launch in the context of the allegations, surprised many, saying, “This is an evolution of last year's car, but it's not as conservative, and while they're very aggressive in certain areas, it's still You can see that we are pushing the limits. [we are] I'm conscious that my opponent will still push very hard.”

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

By completely removing the front horizontal cooling ducts, Red Bull has made the sidepod undercuts (a key part of the design, directing airflow towards the floor edges and the rear of the car) even wider than before.

Instead, air directed to the radiator now entered through two narrow vertical slats beneath the horizontal section of the early sidepod bodywork. The idea is to create more space for more air mass to flow to the sides of the car, thereby creating more downforce and performance.

The rear of the car has two huge tunnels running backwards from the cockpit to the rear of the car. These are reminiscent of last year's Mercedes features, but more pronounced.

These airs not only help with cooling, but also channel air into the car in a way that minimizes obstruction of the outside air that creates downforce and perhaps finds a way to enhance the outside air that is exhausted towards the rear. That's the assumption.

So, has New Way created a new masterstroke? This may not be immediately obvious, but the hopes for a competitive year rest on it. Because if the car clearly outperforms the others in testing, as its predecessor did, it promises to be a very long year.

Pre-season is usually the period of greatest optimism among F1 teams. Everyone feels they have done their best this winter and hopes that will allow them to move forward compared to their rivals. That ambition has not yet been dampened by the realities on the track.

So the somewhat gloomy mood among their rivals speaks volumes about the magnitude of the task facing those not at Red Bull, or, in the words of Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff, a “mountain to climb”. ing.

Few seem to be under any illusions that the world champions can start the season with an advantage on the field. The question is how big will it get and how long will it last?

This belief goes beyond the fact that Red Bull won all but one race last year. But also, as McLaren team principal Andrea Stella expressed last week, their car was so dominant that the team was able to stop development early on and still keep winning. Ta. This will free up more development resources for 2024 designs.

The hope is that Red Bull will be closer to the top of the development curve by regulation and therefore other teams with more discoveries will close their positions as the race progresses.

McLaren were the most improved team in 2023, starting the season near the back of the table before a mid-season upgrade saw them jump right in behind Red Bull. This is one of the most impressive mid-season development steps ever seen in F1. Stella feels that something similar may be possible again, starting from a much higher baseline.

“I think if we can keep up the development speed we had in 2023 and hopefully add to the 2024 car, I think we'll be in a strong position,” he said. “We'll see if that's enough to challenge Red Bull and other top teams.”

Red Bull is not the only new car to attract attention. Mr Newey said at the launch of his car that Mercedes had an “interesting” innovation, but did not say what it was. It is suspected that he mentioned the design of the front wing.

Wolff described this year's Mercedes as a “complete fresh start”. And it needs to be, because, as he himself admitted, they “got the new regulations wrong” that will be introduced in 2022.

The new Mercedes is certainly different from the past two failed designs. And the former champions hope this week's three days in Bahrain will confirm that the fundamental characteristics of their cars have changed.

For the past two years, Hamilton and George Russell have complained that Mercedes are unpredictable and take away their confidence. They had no idea what was going to happen when they turned the corner.

Wolff said: “The goal is to do a good job, look inward, try to put a car on track that is predictable and has a lot of downforce, and give Lewis and George a car that they enjoy driving.” [is] It's not as difficult as last year. I hope we get more good feedback than bad in Bahrain. ”

It's a similar story at Ferrari, Red Bull's closest rival at the end of last season.

Charles Leclerc's three pole positions in the last five races of 2023 are a sign that Ferrari has finally found a way to tame what started the season as a purposeful and vicious car, with performance-wise But it was proof that we had made great progress. Late last year, Ferrari averaged just 0.032 seconds slower than Red Bull on qualifying laps.

Over the winter, they have focused on finding better trade-offs between qualifying and racing. Even if Ferrari were able to outperform Red Bull in one lap, that difference would disappear after the stint.

Team principal Frédéric Vasseur said: “It's always a compromise, but… [2023] As for the season as a whole, we were competitive in qualifying but struggled in the races, which was a global situation. We needed to focus on making the car easier to drive. ”

Leclerc said at the launch that Ferrari's simulators suggested the team had made “huge progress” in this regard. However, it is not always easy to simulate the behavior of these ground-effect vehicles with Venturi underfloor tunnels in the virtual world.

The paradox of last season was that while Red Bull set new standards in terms of dominance, it was also the year in which the field spread from front to back was the smallest in history.The difference between the fastest and slowest car was just 1.4 seconds. [the Alfa Romeo Sauber] average in qualifying.

Alonso expects the same to happen again. “It's going to be a very tough situation,” he says. “This year there will be four or five teams within 0.2 to 0.3 of a second, so within 0.2 of a second we could be fighting for the podium or fighting for outside the top 10.”

And that's another reason why it's so difficult to tease out the true competitive picture from this week's race results. If the margins are very narrow, it becomes even more difficult to eliminate the effects of unavoidable variables in your tests.

By the end of the test Friday night, there will be no clear answers, only hints. And as the team prepares for the car's first real run, McLaren's Lando Norris perhaps sums it up best so far.

“Can Red Bull win?” Norris wondered last week. “I have to say yes because we were very close at one point and we were at one point.

“But the question is, can they win all season? I think it's very difficult.”