Aggressive Red Bull design shows Honda's progress

For any team it is a major task to change from one engine supplier to another. But with the knowledge gained from Toro Rosso using the Honda Formula 1 engine last year, Red Bull's challenge will be just that little bit less complex.

From one engine manufacturer to another, there will always be subtle differences in how they measure the heat rejection from the oil and water.

But the new Red Bull, as with any of Adrian Newey's cars, is as tightly clothed as possible. I'm pretty sure this means the cooling requirements are not too far away from those of last year's Renault unit.

Packaging the cooling is about the sum of all the parts required and it might just be a little easier to cool the Honda, which means there will be more airflow available to generate downforce.

The nose is much simpler than the Mercedes in that it is the same width as the front of the chassis, but with a fairly aggressive S-duct. This pulls air from underneath the droopy nose, which in turn means that there is more mass flow going under the front of the chassis.

It also means that the lift created as the air would normally accelerate over the top of the chassis is reduced, creating less of a negative effect.

The front wing again is a five-element component, not unlike the Mercedes version, with the chord lengths of each element reducing as they go rearwards although there are a couple of subtle differences.

While on the Red Bull the first two flaps join the central single element section, Mercedes increases the chord length of the first element so that only it joins the central section.

Red Bull then increases the chord length of its first element as it goes outboard, whereas Mercedes reduce its cord length. These changes could be thought of as minimal, but there will be quite a big difference in how the front wing performs in high-speed corners.

With the Red Bull, when the car is loaded up laterally and the outboard part of the front wing is at its closest to the ground, it would suffer airflow separation problems. The way Mercedes has it inboard would be more critical under braking, and with this single-element inner connection to the central section any airflow separation problems could affect what is called the Y250 vortex, which will have a detrimental aerodynamic effect downstream.

Red Bull may have lost its Aussie driver to Renault, but it has still kept its boomerang-style bargeboard turning vane. This picks up the airflow coming through the front suspension and redirects it slightly to better prepare its flow direction for the bargeboards and sidepod leading edge.

The bargeboard concept, although difficult to see because of the shakedown car's paint job, is quite different from Mercedes in that it is more of a rectangular shape. It has lots of turning vanes and vortex-generating flicks to help with the performance of the underfloor. Only time will tell who has got it right or wrong.

Red Bull's aerodynamic performance under the leadership of Adrian Newey has always been right up there with the best, so these changes in regulations should play right into its hands - at least for the first part of the season.

But in 'simplifying' the regulations, which is what the powers that be hope they have done, reduces the opportunity for creative minds to come up with creative solutions. The front wing is an example of that, since while there are small visual differences between the Mercedes and Red Bull I'm not seeing anything revolutionary on either of them.

Red Bull may have lost its Aussie driver to Renault, but it has still kept its boomerang style bargeboard turning vane

Red Bull has always been fairly vocal about the performance of the Renault engine, and since signing up with Honda has maintained its stance on how good the Honda is. So now is the time to show it.

Red Bull usually had a good car aerodynamically and on occasions in the hybrid era, but not often enough, it has been unbeatable. Last year it finished 236 points behind Mercedes, and that gap needs to close dramatically - even with the caveat that some of the deficit was caused by unreliability.

I think Honda will get there but I'm not sure it will be for 2019. Yes, Red Bull will probably steal some podiums and perhaps even a win, but to sustain any championship bid Honda will have to deliver better reliability and more performance upgrades than it has shown in the hybrid era so far.

Jake Boxall-Legge on Red Bull's aero innovations

Is this Red Bull's best chance of delivering a title for the first time since 2013? Having kicked off the past couple of seasons on the back foot, with cars that you could say emerged in a marginally underdeveloped state, Red Bull's first job is to pick up from where it left off in the previous season - Max Verstappen ended the year arguably in the strongest position.

That's all dependent on whether Honda has produced the engine to enable the team to challenge, and whether the year of gestation with Toro Rosso has ensured the Japanese powerplant has been able to mature.

In the Red Bull-Honda tie-up, the team has the perfect conduit in Pierre Gasly, who steps up from the junior team to partner Verstappen. His experience of working with Honda, on top of his season racing in Japanese Super Formula, should enable him to avoid the pitfalls that soured Red Bull's relationship with Renault.

Let's begin on a note of disappointment; that livery isn't hanging around post-testing. What we do have is another take on the new front wing rules, in which the second element almost forms a halfway house between being a continuation of the mainplane and being its own separate flap.

The top pair of elements also seem to occupy the maximum volume available, and extend down at the inboard section to truncate the third flap. There's a delicate amount of curvature in the endplate to provide the requisite amount of outwash, and continues the trend of using the flap adjuster to assist with that.

The team has persisted with using a snorkel for the crash structure at the nose, which also features a complex array of flow conditioners underneath - brought further forward to perhaps mirror the function of the 'cape' design that Mercedes has pioneered.

Using a particularly novel interpretation of the S-duct, Red Bull's aerodynamicists appear to be bleeding out any high pressure air from the underside of the car and conditioning the flow marginally above it to ensure that the attachment over the chassis bulkhead is as efficient as possible.

In the Red Bull-Honda tie-up, the team has the perfect conduit in Pierre Gasly

The top suspension wishbone is as low as the designers can make it, providing the minimum of blockage to the sidepod inlets. Behind that, as Gary Anderson has already mentioned, the bargeboards present a complex array of slats and serrations to manage the airflow in that area, especially around the face of the sidepods.

Actually, let's talk about those sidepods now; they're tiny. Red Bull's ethos since joining Formula 1 has been to tightly package everything, a trait of Adrian Newey's influence at the team.

The RB15 takes that to an extreme: the sidepods wind around abruptly to maximise clean airflow around the rear. The inlets, too, are incredibly small.

As perhaps hinted at by the previous Toro Rosso design, it appears that Honda has made great strides with regards to cooling, and as such Red Bull has emerged with a pair of high inlets which amount to little more than letterboxes, using the crash structures as the extremes of the inlet which also play host to the sidepod bargeboards.

Red Bull appears to be off to a good start with its new engine partner, certainly confident enough to explore the limits of tightened-up bodywork. Above the inlets, the mirrors - now further outboard - are mounted at two points, and one of them serves as a shroud to condition the flow over them in a manner similar to Ferrari's efforts last year.

At the rear of the car, the design has been kept as simple as possible to assist with keeping drag at a minimum. There's a single wing mount feeding into the DRS actuator housing, while the team has resisted any temptation to opt for the likes of a T-wing in that area.

The overhead intake seems similar in size to last year's, and the engine cover is opened out a little at the top just to offer a bit more latitude in cooling.

The rear wheel rims have an array of small raised sections, potentially offering more surface area in the wheel to improve heat dissipation in the same manner as Mercedes' more extreme solution. Ahead of the rear wheels, there's the usual proliferation of slots to counteract the effects of turbulence produced by rotation.

With a car now up and running, there's just the small matter of the gap to Mercedes and Ferrari for Red Bull to be concerned about.

Will the team be a more frequent fixture in the hunt for wins and podiums, or will it be looking in its mirrors on a regular basis? People don't design cars like this for the latter.