How Red Bull's gateway F1 car overcame a baked-in disadvantage

Way back when – OK, a little over a decade ago – Red Bull wasn’t yet the all-guns-blazing championship contender it’s subsequently become. All the ingredients were there: Adrian Newey at the draughting board, the ultra-ambitious Christian Horner growing into his team principal role, and a young and hungry pitcrew servicing a pair of drivers in which the fire still burned. With the addition of Sebastian Vettel and the RB5, all those winning elements aligned to achieve their potential – eventually.

It had taken time for Newey, with Horner’s unwavering support, to purge the design team of bad habits hanging over from Red Bull Racing’s previous existence as Jaguar. In 2001 Newey had flirted with the idea of leaving McLaren and joining Jaguar, lured by the prospect of working with his old friend Bobby Rahal, but developed cold feet as the scale of the company’s internal politics became manifest.

Five years later, with different ownership and management in place at Milton Keynes, Newey finally made the move – “Many people viewed it as career suicide,” he would later say. The prevailing view among the paddock opinionati was that Red Bull magnate Dietrich Mateschitz was merely another in a long line of deluded billionaires, and that perhaps two or three years would elapse between him buying Jaguar’s F1 team and realising the truth of the old saying that the quickest way to make a small fortune out of motor racing is to start off with a large one. As a measure of how low expectations were of Red Bull, Newey wasn’t even made to observe a period of ‘gardening leave’ when he told McLaren he was leaving.

In his autobiography How To Build A Car, Newey relates the moment he grasped the magnitude of the task ahead: a meeting with members of the senior engineering team, at least one of whom still referred to the organisation as ‘Jaguar’ and told Newey “we have our procedures and processes and a way of doing things, and we expect you to fit in with them”.

Their new technical director was unamused: “That, in a nutshell, explained why Jaguar had never finished higher than seventh in the constructors’ championship. Regardless of my ability, you would think there would be a recognition by its senior engineers that Jaguar’s processes and approach had not brought results.”

Newey pushed for Red Bull to invest in a driver-in-the-loop simulator, an operations room at the factory for better communications with the race team, and a transient gearbox dyno in order to develop the seamless-shift technologies then becoming vogue. Newey also persuaded Horner to do a deal for Renault engines rather than continuing with Ferrari units that were at least one spec behind the works.

Newey overhauled the design and engineering ethos at the team after its transformation from Jaguar to Red Bull

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Motorsport Images

With Horner’s say-so, Newey hired an HR consultant to investigate his suspicions of mutiny within the engineering office and fired the ringleaders, and poached his old head of aerodynamics, Peter Prodromou, from McLaren. “I also,” Newey recalled, “introduced a culture that meetings should only be deemed a success if a clear set of ideas and actions came from them.”

Newey’s first two Red Bulls, the RB3 and RB4, were quick but often fragile, and not race winners even with the experienced and quick David Coulthard and Mark Webber at the wheel. In the interim, Mateschitz acquired another team, Minardi, taking advantage of regulations that (just about) permitted it to run more or less the same car, albeit with Ferrari engines. It became a persistent source of embarrassment that the newly renamed Toro Rosso would occasionally snatch better results than the senior team.

Deciding early in 2008 that RB4 wouldn’t deliver the goods, Newey turned his attentions entirely to the new technical regulations coming in for 2009. To arrive at these, the FIA had assembled an Overtaking Working Group comprising senior engineers from leading teams, and even commissioned drawings of what it called the Centreline Downwash Generating rear wing, an ugly concept, which was vetoed by the teams.

Newey actually missed Red Bull’s first win because he was ensconced within the design office working on a form of the double-diffuser concept which would work within the existing constraints of the RB5’s rear end

Still, FIA president Max Mosley, under tacit pressure from his old friend Bernie Ecclestone, F1’s ‘ringmaster’, pressed on with changes aimed at solving the perceived issue that there wasn’t enough overtaking in F1.
In hindsight we now know these changes were flawed. The Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems weren’t powerful enough to justify the weight they added to the car. The wider, lower front wings and narrower, higher rear wings did little for F1 aesthetics and introduced new areas of exploitation that actually made it harder to overtake. And a reworded rule constricting the length of the underfloor diffuser to a point behind the rear axle line had failed to eradicate a loophole which three teams spotted and exploited.

Over previous regulatory fiddlings, the FIA had jacked up the front-wing height in stages in the belief it would reduce downforce and cornering speeds. It did, but only in a crude way, and the high wing was more sensitive to wake turbulence from the car in front.

For 2009 the wings were made lower and wider – the full width of the car – and with a flat section over the central 500mm. Aerodynamicists immediately set about exploiting this to set up beneficial vortices at the outer tips of the main plane (to ‘outwash’ air around the front wheels) and the inner tips of the secondary wing elements (to steer air between the front wheels and the nose). The net result was a more turbulent wake than before.

The RB5 design hit some early hurdles even before the double diffuser trump card by Brawn

Photo by: James Mann

Newey found the vortices being shed by the inner elements, known as the Y250 vortices because the wingtips were 250mm from the car’s centreline, were powerful but causing airflow separation along the bottom edge of the nosecone at each side: this is what happens when a rotating flow meets a square edge. So Red Bull’s designers took advantage of another loophole in the regulations to alter the nose into a U-shape in cross-section, with rounded lower corners and a distinctive upper ridge on each side.

The Y250 vortices also interacted with the front suspension elements, prompting the designers to angle the wishbones more sharply. At the rear they found the new diffuser geometry was badly affected by tyre ‘squish’ (when airflow trapped against the surface of the tyre is pushed sideways as it hits the track surface). To manage this they added winglets to the brake duct and fences to the floor, and determined to make the lower beam element of the rear wing work harder to set up a beneficial negative pressure area behind the car.

One of the solutions which would work against Red Bull in the early part of the 2009 season was the decision to move to a pullrod rear suspension design, where the inboard elements could be accommodated in a space previously occupied by the diffuser, allowing much narrower bodywork near the floor. A slight flare above this helped pressurise the flow between the rear wheels.

The RB5 was encouragingly quick when it hit the track, steered by Webber and new recruit Sebastian Vettel, who had won the previous year’s Italian Grand Prix… for Toro Rosso. But then, at the final full test, the moribund Honda team – reborn as Brawn – came out of the blocks flying. Intrigue was already rife about the diffuser loophole being exploited by Toyota and Williams, and here was the similarly equipped Brawn lapping nearly nine tenths faster than anyone else…

Jenson Button won the first two grands prix of the year for Brawn, while Vettel’s maiden appearance for the senior squad ended inauspiciously as he clattered into Robert Kubica two laps from the end of the Australian GP. Third time out, though, in a wet Chinese Grand Prix, Vettel excelled as he had in the foul conditions of Monza 2008, bringing Red Bull its first F1 victory – and a small diplomatic incident ensued when the British rather than Austrian national anthem was played for the constructor during the podium ceremony.

This win came against the run of form, politically as well as on-track. Having assured the stakeholders the so-called ‘double diffusers’ would be banned, Mosley backtracked and declared them legal. Red Bull was worse affected than others since its pushrod rear suspension made it difficult to replicate the double-decker concept which every other constructor now rushed to adopt.

Despite being late to the double diffuser game, it started a design focus change that would prove unbeatable in the years to come

Photo by: James Mann

Newey has often spoken about this as a political stitch-up. At the time, Mosley was in the process of being hounded out of office and McLaren and Ferrari, having set aside their ‘Spygate’ differences, were among the ringleaders in setting up a new association of teams to lobby for better commercial and sporting terms.

“Ultimately whether the double diffuser was legal or not wasn’t actually a technical decision,” Newey told GP Racing’s sister website Motorsport.com. “It was down to the fact that Max Mosley at that time wanted to teach a lesson to Ferrari and McLaren. And because they didn’t have the double diffuser, he said it was legal – because he wanted them to be pushed out.”

Newey actually missed Red Bull’s first win because he was ensconced within the design office working on a form of the double-diffuser concept which would work within the existing constraints of the RB5’s rear end. A first version was ready within a month and fitted to the car ahead of the Monaco Grand Prix, where Vettel crashed and Webber finished fifth.

Future Red Bull chassis would explore the benefits of raising the rear rideheight to boost the effectiveness of the diffuser. The so-called ‘high-rake’ concept was born

Just under a month after that, Newey had the definitive double-decker ready for the British GP at Silverstone, where Vettel took a commanding pole with Webber just behind him on the grid, in third. Vettel drove away from second-placed Rubens Barrichello’s Brawn at up to a second a lap, while Webber overcut the Brazilian at the first round of pitstops to make it a Red Bull 1-2.

That was the team’s second such result of the year after China; Webber led another in Germany and Vettel made it four in Abu Dhabi. By then, Button had amassed enough points to put the drivers’ championship out of reach. But this was just the start for Red Bull.

Working in adversity because of Mosley’s political shenanigans, Newey had made some interesting discoveries. Future Red Bull chassis would explore the benefits of raising the rear rideheight to boost the effectiveness of the diffuser. The so-called ‘high-rake’ concept was born… and others would have to follow as Vettel strode to four consecutive world championships.

The RB5 car took six F1 wins in total

Photo by: James Mann

Specification
Chassis: Carbonfibre monocoque     
Suspension: Double wishbones with pushrods and torsion bars (front), pullrods and torsion bars (rear)   
Engine: Naturally aspirated V8    
Engine capacity: 2400cc   
Power: 750bhp @ 18,000rpm    
Gearbox: Seven-speed seamless-shift semi-automatic    
Brakes: Discs front and rear   
Tyres: Bridgestone   
Weight: 605kg    
Notable drivers: Sebastian Vettel, Mark Webber

Race record
Starts: 34  
Wins: 6   
Poles: 5   
Fastest laps: 6  
Other podiums: 9   
Championship points: 153.5

The car acted as the foundation to Red Bull's era of F1 domination in 2010-13

Photo by: James Mann