Insight into Red Bull’s F1 upgrade struggles: ‘You must come to a peak very soon’

Sky Sports F1 pundit Anthony Davidson has shed light on why teams such as Red Bull have been struggling to find more performance during the 2024 season.

A number of teams have struggled to develop their cars with recent upgrade packages.

Red Bull have slipped back in the pecking order behind McLaren, while Ferrari’s Spanish Grand Prix update resulted in unintended consequences such as bouncing in high-speed corners.

The only team which has consistently been able to improve their car without affecting the handling of it has been McLaren, with Lando Norris dominating the last race at Zandvoort to reduce Max Verstappen’s lead to 70 points.

Speaking on the latest episode of the Sky F1 podcast, Davidson explained why teams are finding it difficult to develop their cars.

“It’s this integration of updates coming that drip feed process that we have where if you’re bringing a new front wing and a new rear wing, but you’ve also modified the floor as well, and then you dare to bring a suspension change because you’re trying to chase mechanically what happens to the car in a slow-speed and high-speed situation it can throw it all out of kilter,” he explained.

“Even if you’re bringing more load to the car, suddenly this thing is undriveable from a driver’s point of view. It doesn’t turn when I want or it turns too much when I don’t want it to.

“The engineers, they’re scratching their heads. They see from the old regulations more downforce equals better lap times and the drivers are going to be happy but it’s not like that anymore.”

After dominating in 2023, winning 21 of the 22 races, Red Bull adopted a more aggressive design philosophy for this year’s RB20 to ensure they remained at the top.

In the opening portion of races, it looked like a masterstroke from Red Bull as Max Verstappen won five of the opening seven races.

However, in recent rounds, Red Bull haven’t won any of the last five races.

Davidson cited the example of Red Bull’s sister team - VCARB - and their decision to abandon their “shiny new upgrade”.

“If you’re chasing performance because other teams are catching you then you might be a bit more daring, more ruthless with what you’re trying to bring,” he added. 

“That’s when you can start getting into trouble. That’s why we keep hearing stories of so and so have brought new updates this weekend… fast forward two weekends later, so and so have reverted back to their old car. I’ve heard it so many times.

“We’ve heard it from RB - the latest team to do that - they were running their older car spec in Zandvoort. What happened to their shiny new upgrade? It didn’t work in Budapest. Wasn’t there in Spa, still not running it now. Why? It’s very hard to figure it out.

“You climb towards the peak of these cars of where the optimum is in terms of development race. You must surely come to a peak very soon were there’s very little wriggle room left. I feel like we’re getting to that point. We’re getting to that point. They’re just chipping away.”