Why dominant Red Bull RB19 still doesn't top McLaren's MP4/4

It’s been not classed as a record because the world championship at that time also included the results from the Indianapolis 500, a totally different category of racing contested by a different bunch of participants. So Ferrari did not win 14 consecutive rounds of the world championship because of that anomaly. But the Indy 500 was not a grand prix so Ferrari does still hold the record for the longest run of consecutive championship status grand prix victories. Red Bull will need to win Spa, Zandvoort and Monza to beat that record.

But it’s an interesting exercise to revisit the Hungaroring 35 years ago when McLaren-Honda was in its formidable stride with Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost. Senna won, marking the team’s 10th consecutive victory.

But in a season when the McLarens often qualified 2sec or more ahead of the field (Nelson Piquet had qualified his Lotus third-fastest at Imola with a time 3.35sec slower than Senna’s pole time!), the Hungarian race was much closer than usual. Generally McLaren’s scale of advantage over the 1988 competition was of an entirely different league to Red Bull’s in ’23.

Toto Wolff last weekend commented that Red Bull was like a car from a higher category and the rest of them are racing F2 cars. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but applied to 1988 McLaren it really would not have been. Its qualifying advantage over the second-fastest car (Ferrari) was 1.47% (around 1.3sec), but its race pace advantage was way bigger as the Ferrari could not run the whole distance at full boost on its fuel allocation whereas the McLaren could. Red Bull’s qualifying advantage this year’s second-fastest car (Ferrari again) so far is 0.26% (around 0.2sec) but like the ’88 McLaren its race advantage is bigger.

Just as was the case last year, the ’23 Red Bull RB19’s advantage is borne of the team’s fuller understanding of the nuances of ground effect aerodynamics. A more sophisticated floor design in combination with longer travel, softer suspension with very tight platform control, has delivered a car way more aerodynamically efficient than the others, one in which the downforce is there, low ride height or high, without needing the highest peaks. Just constantly delivered, the aerodynamic equivalent of a low-revving big torque engine rather than a top-end screamer with more ultimate (but less usable) power.

What was the source of the McLaren’s staggering advantage? As always in F1 it was a team effort but the biggest fundamental factor was Honda and how it reacted to the extreme regulation restrictions for turbocharged engines in the final year they would be permitted. At the end of 1985 the FIA had announced a multi-year regulation glide path, with progressively greater restrictions applied to the 1.5-litre turbos year-on-year, the idea being that by the final year of ’88, the naturally-aspirated 3.5-litre with far fewer restrictions would be the obvious choice. Honda thought otherwise and while it worked away on its secret new V10 for 1989, it created a totally new V6 turbo engine specifically around the 1988 regulations, even though it knew it would be obsolete by the end of the season.

Designated the RA168E, it was a masterpiece. The ’88 regulations reduced the boost limit from 4-bar to 2.5-bar, and restricted the fuel allowance to 150 litres, down from 195-litres. The non-turbo cars were allowed up to 215 litres. Furthermore, the minimum weight limit for turbo cars was set 40kg higher than for the ‘atmos’.

To achieve the required fuel consumption Honda reduced the size of the combustion chamber, increasing the compression ratio massively for more thorough burning. A special blend of fuel was developed to match. The detonation limit was raised by extremely effective cooling of the cylinder heads, with water galleries on the inner (cooler) side of the head. On the block they were located on the outside, so as to absorb less heat. This facilitated more uniform heat distribution around the cylinders and combustion chambers.

The end result was a beautifully compact engine which despite the best efforts of the regulations delivered around 100bhp more than the best naturally-aspirated motors. A 17% power advantage is something Red Bull today could only dream of. But it wasn’t only power, it was efficient power. It could run with the full 2.5-bar boost throughout most races without needing more than the permitted 150 litres of fuel. So although the ‘atmo’ cars ran to a lower weight limit, their fuel consumption meant they’d typically be starting the race around 25kg heavier than the McLarens – though that would of course reduce and they’d be lighter by the end.

There were other turbo motors – from Ferrari, BMW (in the Arrows), Zakspeed and Alfa (in the Osella) – but none could be run with anywhere near the combination of power and fuel efficiency of the Honda.

It was supplied also to the Lotus team, but the Lotus 100T was a dog of a car, not in the same league aerodynamically and severely structurally compromised, as Piquet repeatedly told them. “You could change the springs and dampers all day,” recalled Piquet when we chatted in 2015, “and it would make no difference at all, because the thing just flexed. You could feel it pushing the seat as it flexed. Trying to compete against the McLaren with that was just a joke.”

The MP4/4 into which the Honda was fitted was also a landmark design. Doing away with the previous John Barnard era McLaren V-shaped tub (which had facilitated wider tunnels in the ground effect days), the squarer section allowed the fuel tank and cockpit to be lowered substantially. Together with a tiny new clutch from Honda and an ingenious step-up, three-shaft gearbox designed by David North, the engine was super-low in the chassis too.

It was a more advanced design than the Ferrari or Lotus. But actually the most aerodynamically advanced car on the grid that day in Hungary was almost certainly the Adrian Newey-designed March 881, in which Ivan Capelli and Mauricio Gugelmin qualified fourth and eighth. When I asked Adrian to nominate his six best cars, this was one of them.

With its sculpted endplates and undercut nose, it – and not the MP4/4 – became the most influential design. “I didn’t think to go as far as Jean-Claude Migeot later did with the Tyrrell [019] when [by lifting the driver slightly] he undercut the whole keel [rather than just the nose],” said Newey, “but aerodynamically I think the March was better than anything out there at the time. F1 cars at that time had become very unsophisticated aerodynamically. It was actually more sophisticated in Indycar where I was working at the time because everyone had pretty much the same power unit whereas F1 in the turbo era people had been finding more and more power which meant that drag wasn’t that important, so the cheap and easy way was just to put ever greater wings on the things. They tended to be somewhat inelegant as a result.”

He’d probably have to nominate the Red Bull RB19 in that six best list now. But I somehow doubt he’d delete the March to make way for it. “The 881 was – I don’t like the term, but in this case I think it’s justified – ground-breaking in as much as it was a much smaller package than anything else. We concentrated first and foremost on aerodynamics and it was the first car to treat the nose and front wing as an integrated unit, with a raised front to chassis and nose.

“It had sculpted front wing endplates and very carefully sculpted diffuser etc – aerodynamically very efficient. With that very small team we were able to punch above our weight with it and it kind of did change the direction of design up and down the grid because you could see the 881 genes in the cars that came out subsequently. In those days the regs were sufficiently free that you could come in as a very small team like that and come up with something that could punch above the weight and budget and size of the team.”

Just as all cars between 2010 and 2013 looked very much liked Newey’s 2009 Red Bull RB5.

In that hazy Budapest day 35 years ago Senna was followed across the line by the sister car of Prost, around half-a-minute clear of Thierry Boutsen’s third place Benetton-Ford and one-and-a-half minutes clear of the fourth place Ferrari of Gerhard Berger which just avoided being lapped. Max Verstappen’s victory margin of 34s over Lando Norris’ McLaren last Sunday was comparable, but this was Verstappen’s biggest winning margin of the season. Hungary ’88 represented one of the smallest winning margins for the McLaren.

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner was 14 years old when McLaren set that 11 consecutive wins record (which could have been 16 but for Senna’s collision when lapping Jean-Louis Schlesser at Monza). He probably did not imagine he’d be overseeing the breaking of that record. But as well as congratulating his own team for their efforts, he was quick to acknowledge the common link of the two eras: “I think we have to congratulate Honda as well, because they’ve done it twice now,” he said. “They were 35 years apart, but we have to take our hat off to Honda for that contribution for this great result as well.”