“THE Red Bull He won by 17 seconds and hasn’t even touched the car since August. So you can pretty much imagine where it will be next year…” said a visibly broken Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton at the end of the Abu Dhabi GP, the 22nd and final race of this season’s Formula One season.

But what makes him so pessimistic? In Formula 1, the decisive parameter for a car’s victory in recent years has become less and less its mere speed and more its ability to protect its tires in a qualifying lap and – above all – in the racing laps.

On a qualifying lap, the car’s speed is balanced by its ability to warm up its tires fairly quickly and keep them below the upper temperature limit of their thermal “window” during that absolutely punchy lap that stresses them.

But in racing, in the multi-lap laps that each set of tires must complete, its ability to keep the tires within the temperature window they need to perform well without excessive wear comes into play. The better a team handles this task, the faster their lap will be between each pit stop and each tire change.

Red Bull showed at the Abu Dhabi GP that it is still an unrivaled team in this area. As far as we know, this is due, among other things, to the intelligent suspension, which impressively limits the dipping of the bow and stern when braking or accelerating.

This has two big advantages. Firstly, this drastically reduces the load on the tires. The second reason is that the ground slope remains lower when accelerating or braking, allowing Red Bull to place the ground closer to the ground.

And in the age of ground effect from 2022 onwards, where the majority of lift is generated by the air channels in the ground, this is a huge advantage, bringing the design of Adrian Newey and his team of designers to its full and impressive potential in Milton Keynes.

Turning to Hamilton’s pessimism about 2024, it seems that this can be explained by the fact that this design invention from Red Bull has matured into the thinking of Newey and the team, with time and the development of any problems was released and based on this This RBR will further develop the new RB20.

More specifically, we know that both Mercedes and Ferrari will significantly change the design philosophy of New Year’s cars next year. Presumably adopting the thinking behind the suspension and aerodynamics of the Red Bull RB19.

But the teams from Brackley and Maranello will be required first and foremost to understand their cars with the new philosophy. The new season includes just three days of development testing, just 24 hours before the first GP on March 2, 2024 in Bahrain. Therefore, no one knows how long it will take even for companies with so much engineering expertise to develop their new cars.

At the same time, Red Bull has not only already understood this design philosophy, but has perfected it, and even fully understood its refinement. This is a very large momentum advantage relative to history: where the team that came out on top at the start of a new regulatory framework (like Mercedes in 2014 and Red Bull in 2022) will stay on top right until the end of that framework could because every year it was an evolutionary step ahead of the competition.

But there are always doubts. I doubt that this is not so absolute. After all, Red Bull has managed to keep up with Mercedes’ performance in 2021 – precisely because it has done an equally good job with Honda’s engineers in the area where Mercedes gained the upper hand in 2014: that Hybrid engine.

Mercedes High Performance Powertrains had been working on the infamous split turbo for two years before 2014. He divided the turbo into two parts, placed them on either side of the heat engine, and inside the V placed the MGU-H electric motor (driven by the heat from the turbo), which connected it coaxially to the two turbo parts on the sides of the V.

This axis reached up to 120,000 revolutions per minute. Renault, which supplied engines to Red Bull, suddenly plunged from peak to trough with its own hybrid powertrain in 2014 (paid for by the derogatory comments that RBR was not afraid to make publicly), and Honda bitterly discovered how difficult it was to do so to copy technology at the start of their ill-fated second era with McLaren.

But at the end of the decade, Red Bull’s agreement with Honda came and the Japanese engineers deepened their understanding of this technology. In 2021, Red Bull now had the driving force to threaten Mercedes on an equal footing – and thereby deprive them of the only championship they have lost in eight years, the ’21 Drivers’ title.

Perhaps this convergence of vehicle performance in the coming years, which RBR director Christian Horner has so often touted as a possibility as the regulatory framework matures (perhaps to keep his team motivated and dispel complacency), can also be achieved in the field This time aerodynamics and vehicle dynamics. Certainly Ferrari, Mercedes and now McLaren and Aston Martin have the depth for something like this.

In addition, Scuderia director Fred Wasser is not as pessimistic as Hamilton: “We don’t have to change everything in 2024”said the Frenchman. “When you’re 3.4 tenths behind… I mean, Red Bull doesn’t have the magic wand. We lost a lot of points due to drivability [του μονοθεσίου], our company on the route, from obstacles. We shouldn’t just limit ourselves to one area.

If we do that, it will be wrong. We have a different approach: we will try to push every aspect to the limit. We have already managed to improve a number of areas this year. We need to maintain the same approach for 2024 and we will see where we are in Bahrain. We have to stay optimistic”Water concluded.

Red Bull’s show of force in Abu Dhabi

Why was the way RBR took its 21st win in the 22nd race of the year so impressive from a tire management perspective? Because in a race where tire wear was worse than expected, Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez had the immense luxury of making their second pit stop 7 to 10 laps behind their main rivals.

And it wasn’t as if the Dutchman had clean air and a clear field and a big gap to protect the hard rubber of the second stint, because the Mexican had the same opportunity to postpone his second pit stop, although he struggled to manage it it from 9th place, where he started, to the rankings.

Verstappen had to apply enough pressure on the medium tire he started on to hold off Leclerc in the first corner and then get out of Ferrari’s DRS zone on the first lap. This caused increased wear on the champion’s right front tire and forced him to also adopt the two-pit stop pattern that the other protagonists of the race were already beginning to establish.

But before his first stop, the Dutchman managed to protect his middle tire enough to finish two or even three laps behind Russell, Norris and Piastri, without losing the gap to Leclerc that he needed to stay safe from the Monegasque undercut be. In any case, Leclerc didn’t do it, because he came to his first tire change one lap after Max and also took care of his middle tire in the first stint, which worked better than all the others on the Cavallino.

However, the excellent tire handling of the RB19 (of any kind) was evident with the second set of hard rubber tires. In the two cars in Milton Keynes, although the pressure and load were different, it still took 7 to 10 laps until the second pit stop.

Even though Verstappen didn’t need it, Perez ended up with a huge grip advantage over all the cars he had to overtake on the way to the podium (notwithstanding that he hit him with the insanely unfair 5-minute penalty for colliding with Norris lost). ). A benefit of 7 to 10 shots of fresher rubber.

The Mexican made it to 3rd place, and then Leclerc – for his own reasons – let him move up to 2nd place. This means that Verstappen had unimaginably more speed when he wasn’t developing. Whether you win by 17 seconds or a minute, nothing changes.

And if Leclerc hadn’t used his initial pace to lure everyone into a two-stop strategy instead of the one everyone was planning, Red Bull’s advantage in tire management would have given them an even more comfortable victory. Because it would allow her to move at a pace that no one could even come close to without blowing out their tires.