Mark Hughes: ‘Can we conclude that Red Bull’s restrictions and penalty haven’t worked?’

With Red Bull coming off the back of one of the most dominant team performances in Formula 1 history, can we conclude that the two sets of wind tunnel restrictions placed upon it – one for having won the constructors’ championship the previous year and another as a penalty for having exceeded the 2021 cost cap – have not worked?

It depends if the objective was to cripple the team or just to impose a penalty which would hurt its development capability, but still keep the sporting element. To take an opponent out or to apply a proportionate penalty – or something in between.

Looking first at the regulation ‘success penalty’, winning the 2022 constructors’ championship meant Red Bull would be allocated only 70% of the nominal limit of 320 tunnel runs in a six-month period, i e: 224 runs. This would correlate in CFD usage too. There is a 5% difference for each position in the constructors’ championship and the bottom team can use 115% of the nominal limits. In addition to that, Red Bull received a penalty for the cost cap breach of a further 10% reduction in tunnel and CFD usage, bringing them down to 63% of the nominal total. It meant Red Bull could make 202 runs compared to 368 for Williams (as last placed 2022 constructor). It compared to 240 runs for Ferrari, 256 for Mercedes, 288 for McLaren and 320 for Aston Martin.

This year’s dominant Red Bull RB19 was largely conceived and designed under the restrictions applying in 2022 when it had the second-biggest restriction (to Mercedes) which would mean 240 runs. But its through-season development would be constrained by the more severe current restriction.

Looking at the car’s form, yes it has won almost every race but its margin of superiority has been eroded through the season, if we look at its qualifying form. In the first 11 races its margin of superiority over the second-fastest qualifying car (Ferrari) was 0.281% (which works out at 0.236sec). In the subsequent 10 races (written before Abu Dhabi) that margin was down to 0.069% (0.0578sec). Relative to the closest opposition it lost around 0.18sec in the second half of the season compared to the first. Sure, its margin of superiority in the races is greater than in qualifying but that can’t be accurately measured – and the trend stands.

So is it feasible that the 2024 Red Bull, largely created under the current restrictions, will suffer accordingly? Probably not. Its aerodynamics may be less fully researched, but it’s the basic concept which makes the big difference in performance.

Mercedes has spent two years chasing the wrong concept and has suffered accordingly. It has put a lot of performance on each of the W13 and W14 from the beginning of their respective seasons to the end, way more performance than Red Bull has added to its car. But the basic shortfall was from the initial car concept. The wind tunnel and CFD provides you with answers, but the value of those answers depends on the questions.

Merc’s technical director James Allison elucidated on that, saying, “It’s about what you choose to place value upon. Once you set out your stall for what you place value on – i e: where is the treasure buried? – your factory will dig that out of the ground for you but only if you are looking in the right places. We placed value on the wrong things. So you get a car which reflects what you placed value on. But they weren’t the right things to place value on.

“If a team is vigilant and has stumbled by good fortune at valuing things which bring lap time, then as long as they don’t get carried away with themselves and they keep fighting knowing the breath of their enemies is on their necks, they can stay there. It’s not any restrictions or the cost cap making it that way. We who are chasing need to chase a bit harder and they need to get a bit complacent.”

“Mercedes has spent two years chasing the wrong concept and suffered”

That bit about stumbling by good fortune on valuing the things which will bring the most lap time is where Red Bull might take issue. They would argue it was from arriving at a better understanding of where those sensitivities are, either by a deeper intuitive understanding or by having better tools at finding out where they are in their R&D programmes. Or sometimes just by looking at the concepts of the opposition and working backwards from there to find the ‘treasure’.

Both Mercedes and Ferrari have conceded that their ’24 cars will be totally new, having found the limitations of the concepts they introduced last year. We might infer they will be following the Red Bull concept more closely, but the ‘concept’ is about more than the shape of the sidepods; it’s about what the aerodynamic map is and how the mechanical aspects of the car facilitate it. Mercedes said it had looked at Red Bull-style sidepods and had found no value from them. It even introduced them part-way through this year, but only, as Allison says, to tick off an area they no longer needed to worry about, not because they brought lap time. One senses pressure from the drivers may have had a part.

The treasure isn’t the sidepods. But for the sake of a more competitive championship next year, let’s hope the others are at least now looking for it in the right place.

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Since he began covering grand prix racing in 2000, Mark Hughes has forged a reputation as the finest Formula 1 analyst of his generation
Follow Mark on Twitter @SportmphMark