The Red Bull breakthrough made after RB20 re-evaluation

Pierre Waché: Red Bull RB21 a complete ‘re-evaluation’ of RB20

The dominant start to the F1 2025 season enjoyed by Max Verstappen and Red Bull gave way to a rather more difficult year as the evolution of the car introduced handling difficulties which resulted in Red Bull ceding ground to rivals like McLaren, Ferrari, and Mercedes.

While Verstappen successfully defended his crown to win a fourth consecutive championship, Red Bull slipped to third in the Constructors’ Championship – their title tilt undone by a period of reduced competitiveness, and Sergio Perez’s inability to score points.

But Red Bull showed distinct improvement in the final quarter of the championship, with a greater understanding of where their development direction had gone awry, leading to rectifying measures taken. This move paid off almost immediately with Verstappen’s victory in the Sprint race in the USA, followed by authoritative wins in Brazil and Qatar.

The big question of Red Bull over the winter break was which direction the Milton Keynes-based squad would choose for this, the final year of the current regulations.

Given the diminishing returns of a big change in direction, would evolution or revolution be the name of the game for Pierre Waché’s technical department?

During the busy three days of pre-season testing, Waché gave us exclusive insight into the thought process that has gone into the creation of the new RB21 and explained that, while the car is “reacting more or less as expected”, it will take some time to extract the performance of the machine given its quite different characteristics from last season.

“We reevaluated all the concepts of the car,” he told PlanetF1.com.

“We modified most of the stuff that is maybe not as visible as the older car – the concepts overall stay the same – but plenty of stuff has changed underneath and inside the car that, in terms of cooling, suspension, aero package, everything has changed to achieve the characteristics we like.

“The overall shape of the car and bodywork, which is mainly what you will see, are similar, but not because the concept… I would say we re-evaluated, and we think it was the best compromise for what we were looking for.”

Given that Verstappen has made it clear that he wasn’t overly enamoured with the RB20, despite achieving another title with it, Waché explained how steps have been taken to make the car more malleable in the hands of its drivers.

Asked about the physical attributes of the RB20 which led to the balance issues which Verstappen was so vociferous about, Waché replied, “I don’t want to say too much, but it’s clear that we had a very, very peaky car, with high potential that was difficult to extract – if we wanted to extract this, it was creating some difficulty for the driver to use it, and, especially, at slow corners, giving some instability for the driver to use it.

“What we did this year, is to maybe reduce the complete potential of the car, the peakiness, but giving a more easy way to use by the driver – that’s what our main purpose was, especially on the entry of the corner.

“It’s not as simple as that, because it’s a characteristic that the peak of downforce is not only on one dimension. It’s a multi-dimensional system that is not only downforce – it is also suspension-wise and what the kinematic is doing, but is an overall car characteristic of how the driver feels.

“But, fundamentally, it’s exactly that – reduce the overall potential in grip and capacity of the car to make it more flat.

“That’s what we are seeing at the moment.

“Last year, we had a quite difficult car and, to rebalance it, it would put you in a corner in terms of what you could do [setup-wise].

“Now it is giving us a wider range of setups that we have to explore. And it will take time to see what the best compromise is, and the compromise could be quite different from track to track, because it gives us a lot more freedom.”

Given the improvements shown by Red Bull in the latter stages of the 2024 season, was it a case of refining that idea further, optimising the package that had been used in the final races of the season?

“No, last year we did a patch, I would say,” he laughed, revealing that the RB21, at this point, is “roughly” around 0.3-0.4 seconds a lap quicker than the RB20’s spec used in the 2024 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

“A patch to reduce the potential a bit, make it a little bit wider, but it was a small patch. Now we did the full concept of the car in this direction.”

A major point of contribution for last year’s issues was explained by team boss Christian Horner as being down to correlation, ie, the real-life data and performance of the car, relative to what the figures from the simulated data from CFD and the wind tunnel suggested should be happening.

This isn’t a unique phenomenon for teams in the ground-effect era, and appears to be exacerbated by older wind tunnels – like the “Cold War relic” that Red Bull has been using ahead of a switchover to a newly-constructed tunnel.

Red Bull’s Bedford tunnel is circa 70 years old, and has been used by the team since entering Formula 1 in 2005. While the new tunnel, located on campus, is “three months ahead of schedule”, the team’s old facility is still in use for now – and has been used to create RB21.

McLaren and Ferrari, in contrast, are operating brand-new wind tunnel facilities and are not encountering the same correlation issues that Red Bull and, previously, Mercedes, encountered a little earlier in the current rules cycle.

But, having managed to right the ship during last season, how confident is Waché of having been able to figure out where the correlation issues stemmed from and, as a result, been able to compensate for them?

“I’m not confident,” he bluntly said.

“But, at some point, you have to use the tools you have and take all the information you can to make some decision.

“We still have, and I think everybody has… not correlation, but you need some extrapolation of what will happen in your tools to the track.

“It is a part of the engineering job we are doing. The confidence is, I don’t think it is 100 percent, but it is not a show stopper.

“You have to use what you know, what you control, and make sure that the extrapolation works as much as possible, and improve the way you operate in your tools.”

Pierre Waché responds to Adrian Newey’s ‘inexperienced’ comments

In January, former Red Bull F1 chief technical officer Adrian Newey offered a surprise personal theory as to why development of the RB20 had gone astray.

Newey, who left the F1 team last May but continues to work for Red Bull Technologies on the RB17 hypercar project, had been with Red Bull since 2007 and, during his tenure, led the Milton Keynes-based team’s technical endeavours across the board.

This included the oversight and guidance of senior designers and engineers like Waché who, having joined the team in 2013, was appointed under Newey as technical director in ’18.

With Waché heading up Red Bull’s technical organisation, along with other senior technical staff like Ben Waterhouse and Paul Monaghan, the legendary designer suggested that their relative inexperience had led Red Bull astray.

“It’s something I was starting to become concerned about [the development direction], but not many other people in the organisation seemed to be very concerned about,” Newey told Germany’s Auto Motor und Sport.

“From what I can see from the outside, but I don’t know, the guys at Red Bull – this is no criticism, but I think they just perhaps, through lack of experience, kept going in that same direction, and the problem came more and more acute to the point that even Max found it difficult to drive.”

If those comments, made by a man Waché has worked closely with on championship-winning machines like the sport’s most dominant car ever – the RB19 – bother him, he certainly doesn’t show it.

Displaying the usual forthright logic expected from a no-nonsense engineer, Waché said he couldn’t argue with the surface level intent of Newey’s comments.

“It’s true that I have a lot less experience than him!” he said.

“He’s 66 years old, and I’m 50 – 16 years less experience than him. I cannot comment on that.

“I don’t take it personally, and maybe it’s true. It doesn’t change anything, I think what you have to learn… this type of comment, for me, doesn’t matter.

“What is important is what is true – we didn’t do enough of a good job during last year, and we lost ground in terms of performance – maybe by experience, maybe by misunderstanding some stuff, and we tried to correct it.

“What is correct is that it looks, for me, that we understand. I think this is how you learn the most. When we were in 2023, we learned less than last year, and every problem you have gives you a little bit more to understand what you need to do.

“In this sense, I think it was very beneficial, and it’s what I enjoy the most. Fixing a problem is our job.

“Personally, it doesn’t affect me. From my point of view, my job is not a personal job. My job is to make sure, in an engineering competition, I’m more affected by the fact that we are not good enough and losing, than a personal comment about myself.”

Asked whether comments like these serve as a spur to create a ‘Pierre Waché legacy’ at Red Bull, the Frenchman said, “My desire is not to make my name famous. My desire is to make the team winning. That’s it. No more than that.

“I’m paid enough to do this job and to enjoy it. I don’t need more. I would prefer that the paddock say ‘the Red Bull team did a fantastic job’ more than ‘Pierre Waché did a good job’.

“It doesn’t change my life. I’m 50. I’m more at the end than the beginning. What we have to look at is more the young people growing into the team, bringing a lot of performance, and working hard. They do the same stuff as me, same number of hours, same stuff… we’re all together.”