Can Red Bull’s vital updates at Imola return it to F1 title contention?

After Friday practice at Imola, Red Bull had ample reasons to be concerned. It was wholly unsurprising that McLaren looked set to take its usual place at the top of the tyre management table, but the early estimations suggesting Red Bull had a deficit of around 0.5s per lap to the Woking squad was certainly unforeseen.

Lando Norris, then, was right in his post-FP2 assertion that Red Bull would find a way to catch up. After all, the FP2 long runs do express certain scenarios expected across the run-time of a full grand prix, but there are undeniable caveats that must also be applied - fuel load, engine modes, et al - to the broader lap time data.

Red Bull followed up on its Miami updates with new additions to the car at Imola. The floor trialled on Max Verstappen's car through the weekend in Florida was now fully minted with the further inclusion of new sidepods, plus revised rear wheel aerodynamics and duct-work around the wheel hub. It took a few sessions to dial them in; it's rare that anything simply works off the bat in F1, and each upgrade has its own requisite tinkering time to get it to play with the existing bits on the car.

And sure, the numbers didn't look great after Friday's running, but the most important part was that it was in possession of said numbers. Once the trackside engineers and the support engineers back at Milton Keynes got their mitts on them, the overnight work could begin.

"By Friday, we sort of understood what they were doing and were able to fine-tune the set-up around them going into Saturday," Christian Horner explained. "And then the car - really, after Max jumped out of it in P3, he was much, much happier. And that carried through into quali. And then obviously again in the race. Going into the race today, we didn't know what to expect tyre deg-wise, because McLaren obviously looked so good on Friday. We genuinely thought it was going to be very tough to beat them today. So it was very reassuring that actually our deg was better than theirs today."

Much has been said of Red Bull's RB21. We've contended previously that it's a genuinely quick car with a tiny operating window, although this assessment has not been good enough for a handful of fans because it doesn't fit the narrative that Verstappen is proving transcendent in a turd-bucket chassis. But nuance can exist in F1 discourse. Verstappen is absolutely demonstrating his class this year and has been by far the most impressive driver, but performing exquisitely in a car and getting good results out of it by definition proves that it's possible for the car to achieve those things. It's all about how the driver operates it, and the Dutchman is walking the high-wire act perfectly.

Verstappen is flying in the RB21

Photo by: Malcolm Griffiths / Formula 1 via Getty Images

But even he couldn't hope to compete in races where tyre degradation was a considerable factor. Even in the event that Verstappen got every single micro-correction right during a stint - minimal slip, no scrub through the longer-radius corners, and no lock-ups - the Red Bull still had a tendency to chew through the Pirellis in the final third of a race stint, while McLaren's did not. Accusations that the British squad was doing something untoward to maintain that tyre degradation advantage didn't wash - at some point, rather than point the finger outwards, it requires oneself to look inwardly.

And, awarding the gamut of full credit to Red Bull, it has. There are two mechanisms to this: consistent downforce, and temperature management - both of which the team has addressed.

The downforce characteristic is one that's easy to explain: if you've got an aero package that delivers strong levels of downforce in both high- and low-speed corners, the rear axle is simply less prone to sliding because the tyres have more vertical load placed upon them. In Red Bull's approach, there have been several facets in its development over the past two rounds which have allowed this: that it has concentrated on drawing more performance from the underbody with its sidepod and floor updates, and from the more direct revisions of the aerodynamic furniture clustered upon the rear wheel uprights.

"It's so difficult now with these cars. You put one millimetre there or two millimetres there, it's such a narrow window. Plus on top of the tyre, it's so narrow now. More or less, you have no travel with this car" Pierre Wache

This is all great, and minimising the lateral forces through the tyres is a justified pursuit - but it only gets you so far, if the mechanism of maintaining a sensible temperature within the wheel assembly is not well developed. Suggestions are that McLaren's superiority in mitigating tyre degradation lies in this area, and spy shots of the exposed wheel hubs do suggest that the thermodynamicists have been busy understanding and building optimal flow in this region.

The build and retention of heat in the tyres is different for both qualifying and race conditions. On a single lap, the tyres need to be up to temperature at the start; one can afford to be slightly aggressive here, with the caveat that the tyre shouldn't overheat half-way through the lap and knock the car out of its peak performance range. In a race, it's different; sure, the tyres do need heat at the start of a race to ensure a driver doesn't enter first corner several positions behind where they qualified, but the generation of heat must be a lot slower to ensure that the full chain chemical reactions behind thermal degradation don't occur straight away. Then there's the temperature maintenance aspect of that, and airflow through the brake ducts and the wheel hub must sufficiently pull hot air out of the assembly.

Hence why Red Bull has addressed the rear wheel duct areas too, to give it a bit more of a chance of capitalising on its added downforce. Otherwise, it can mitigate the abrasion on the tyre through reduced sliding - but it still wanders into the same end-of-stint thermal deg if the temperatures are not controlled.

Red Bull is starting to be able to match McLaren on the consistent downforce and tyre temperature management fronts

Photo by: Peter Fox / Getty Images

"I think definitely we've managed to put some performance on the car and get the car into a better window; as soon as you take away the sliding, you're able to manage the temperature a lot better," Horner added. "The McLarens on Friday, again, looked very, very fast on the long runs. But to have the pace that we did in the race today, I would say that's probably, since certainly Brazil last year, which was obviously a wet race, that's the first time I can remember in a long time we've had the pace to really pull away and out-deg the McLaren. So that's very encouraging and a great result for the effort that's gone in behind the scenes."

Technical director Pierre Wache agreed that the updates allowed Red Bull far more opportunity to manage its tyres through a stint, although suggested that differences between Friday and Sunday in degradation profile had also helped Red Bull. He also laid bare how difficult it was to dial in the set-ups of the current generation of cars, with just 'millimetres' involved in precipitous swings in performance.

"I think the degradation was a different mechanism here. It looks like clearly the wear and the surface of the tyre were completely different than what we saw on Friday," Wache explained. "But the set-up improved a lot. And I think the new package gives the opportunity to improve even more. Even more for the race than the quali, because quali we missed out. But yeah, I think the update was working well.

"It's so difficult now with these cars. You put one millimetre there or two millimetres there, it's such a narrow window. Plus on top of the tyre, it's so narrow now. More or less, you have no travel with this car. It's so difficult and the engine mode has a big effect also."

Is this the point at which Red Bull has genuinely turned the tide on McLaren? In an environment that deals so frequently in cold, hard logic and data, it's only fair to ask for a much larger sample size before making a real conclusion. Both Wache and Horner were not yet ready to offer an affirmative judgement post-Imola.

"I'm not sure it was a big improvement," Wache said. "But it was an improvement in the right direction. I think it opened some set-ups and maybe Max being able to use it more as a car. I cannot say more than that at the moment."

"I'll tell you in a week," Horner added. "I think generally we're getting a better grip and a better understanding and the technical team have been working very hard on it. And I think that that's a second win, arguably we should have won in Jeddah, on the front row yesterday. It's been a very positive weekend and I think we're building a bit of momentum which is important at this stage in the championship."

Both Horner and Wache don't want to make premature confirmations that Red Bull has made a breakthrough

Photo by: Peter Fox / Getty Images

What Imola did demonstrate is, taking into account the long gestation times for developments like these, that Red Bull has been long aware of where its tyre management issues resided and what needed to be addressed before knocking on the door. But Imola is just one example, and the next race in Monaco is scarcely set to offer too many answers in tyre management either, when accounting for its low deg and mandatory no-less-than-two-stop strategies.

But Barcelona and Montreal, which both have their share of higher-load corners and moderately abrasive track surfaces, should return much more definitive answers to the question. By then, we'll likely have another query that demands a solution: how will McLaren respond?

The development race continues on between McLaren and Red Bull

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool