Newey: We must be absolute pragmatists

After five rounds of the season, Red Bull Racing has more than double the points of its closest rivals, Aston Martin, and almost three times more than Ferrari, which is 4th in the Constructors’ Championship.

Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez seem to take turns winning every race in a row, and it is clear that a car built under the leadership of Adrian Newey allows them to achieve such impressive results.

He took part in the latest edition of Talking Bulls (which can be interpreted as “talking bulls” and “talk about bulls”), the official podcast of the team from Milton Keynes, and he was asked if it was possible to say that RB19 even surpassed his expectations?

“Yes and no,” said the head of the technical department of Red Bull Racing, smiling. – At the start of the season, in the first three races, I definitely outperformed. But we have to be absolutely pragmatic, because there are still twenty plus races ahead (along with sprints), and the rivals will try their best, so we must continue to resist, and we will see what we can achieve at the end of the year.

As soon as you allow yourself to become proud of what you have achieved, you will be immediately outstripped, and this should not be allowed. When you’re in the lead and everyone thinks you’re the favourite, that situation in itself creates additional pressure. If you suddenly have problems, everyone immediately starts to criticize you, but if everything goes well, everyone says: “We knew that it would be so.”

From the outside it may seem that everything is going smoothly, but in fact it is not quite so. After pre-season testing, we had some concerns about reliability, so there are always reasons to worry. They are connected not only with reliability, but also with the efficiency of the car, for example, in Melbourne we could not find the optimal approach to rubber, which was especially noticeable in training on Friday. We managed to deal with all this only at the qualifying stage, but it is clear that not everything is so easy for us.

In 2022, a new technical regulation came into force in Formula 1, and this was the most ambitious reform in the last 40 years, when there was a transition to cars with a flat bottom. So the chassis has changed very significantly, and I must admit that when I first saw the new regulations, I tensed up a bit.

But the teams put some pressure on the FIA, and in the end I calmed down, because the regulations were adjusted, and the engineers got more freedom than we initially thought.

At the beginning of last year, the cars of different teams were quite noticeably different from each other in appearance, and it’s always good when they can be recognized not only by colors. We chose a certain concept, Ferrari acted in its own way, but still their car as a whole resembled ours, and Mercedes chose a completely different path.

Over the course of the first season, you decide on a strategy for further modernization of the car, but you can never say with certainty which of the concepts will potentially prove to be the most effective. In the course of aerodynamic research and in the process of improving the chassis, you must imagine what you want to achieve in the future, what kind of car you should end up with.

So far, it seems that our car is based on a good concept. Our RB19 is an evolution of last year’s RB18, in the process of creating which we took into account a number of points that did not suit us, and tried to eliminate them.

Last year’s car was a bit heavier than it should have been, but we were also not entirely happy with certain aspects of handling. In general, the usual process of fine-tuning aerodynamics was going on, and in addition, the regulations were adjusted, and we had to make changes to the design of the bottom. All these things must be taken into account, and this year we are working with a machine that looks like last year, but if we talk about all sorts of nuances, it has been significantly modernized.”