Red Bull’s unique ‘bunny ears’ and ‘shark inlet’ cooling solutions explained
Red Bull's unique approach to their cooling solutions on the RB20 F1 car has been explained.
Some intriguing and unusual details of Red Bull’s RB20 F1 car have been spotted as pre-season testing got underway in Bahrain.
There was plenty of attention on the RB20 when it broke cover properly on the opening day of running in Bahrain, after Red Bull had raised eyebrows with the launch of a dramatic evolution for their 2024 challenger.
It didn’t take long for the intricacies of Red Bull’s design solutions to emerge, with tech experts pouring over images and footage of the RB20 as it hit the track.
And F1 tech expert Sam Collins noticed two “absolutely huge cooling inlets” either side of Max Verstappen’s head.
According to Collins, Red Bull are “really pushing their design to a new level” for 2024.
“Look behind Max Verstappen’s head,” he said. “Nobody has really picked up on this as far as I can tell, but two absolutely huge cooling inlets either side of the drivers head.
“Red Bull are taking a huge amount of cooling air from the car. At the launch of the Red Bull, the team had these parts completely covered up, blanked off, made to look like a bit of the cockpit surround. And all of our attention was on where was the normal Red Bull sidepod inlet.
“Well I can tell you they’ve got two conventional sidepod inlets, well, they are not that conventional, and you can see two inlets here, one lower inlet, very much a small slit.
“Very similar to what Mercedes used last year but much tighter and then one, some people call it a ‘shark’ inlet higher up, just underneath this upper intrusion on the top of the sidepod, so tripe cooling inlets either side of the Red Bull.
“That’s something we haven’t really seen before. So Red Bull are really pushing their design to a new level and this is crucial on making the Red Bull zero-pod, if you want to call it that concept, work.
“Because what Mercedes struggled with, and moving Lewis Hamilton and George Russell forward in the cockpit, was that they had to move all the cooling systems into the middle of the car.
“Mercedes never really made that work and they had to move the drivers back. But Red Bull haven’t really seemed to need to move Max Verstappen or Sergio Perez in the cockpit forward at all, because I think they’ve re-aligned their cooling system with those shoulder coolers.”
Sky F1’s pitlane reporter Ted Kravitz referred to the cooling solution above the cockpit area as “bunny rabbit ears”.
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