New Red Bull RB20 decline theory emerges with two key F1 2024 factors

Damon Hill, the 1996 World Champion, believes F1’s cost cap and car research restrictions have at least “partly” contributed to the Red Bull RB20’s mid-season decline in F1 2024.

Having produced the most dominant season in history in 2023, winning all but one race as Max Verstappen collected a third consecutive World Championship, Red Bull had been expected to consolidate their position in F1 2024.

F1 cost cap and aero restrictions behind Red Bull RB20 woes?

Yet despite starting the season with four wins from the first five races – including three one-two finishes for Verstappen and Sergio Perez – Red Bull have stumbled by comparison over recent months.

Verstappen has been restricted to just three wins across the last nine rounds, with his last victory occurring at the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona on June 23.

The reigning World Champion continues to hold a 78-point lead over Lando Norris in the Drivers’ standings ahead of the final 10 races, starting with next weekend’s Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, with Red Bull nursing a 42-point advantage over McLaren in the Constructors’ Championship.

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Since the 2021 season a budget cap and aerodynamic research restrictions have been in place in F1 with the aim of levelling the playing field and creating closer competition on track.

The amount of wind tunnel runs and CFD testing each team is allowed to carry out is based on the previous season’s Constructors’ Championship placings, with the World Champions afforded considerably less research work than the team who finished 10th.

The order of this sliding scale is reset on June 30 during each season to reflect the state of play during the current campaign.

Hill is convinced that the post-2021 budgetary and development restrictions have played a role in Red Bull’s recent struggles, claiming the car’s decline has been “quite dramatic” since the start of the season.

Appearing on the F1 Nation podcast, he said: “It is impossible to call because I think the trajectory has been quite noticeable. The plateauing of Red Bull and Max Verstappen has been quite dramatic.

“I don’t know whether it’s the cost cap or all the other things they bring in, like the restrictions for [teams] who have won more than anyone else in the previous season, but it has to be partly that.”

With Norris and team-mate Oscar Piastri collecting their maiden grand prix victories in Miami and Hungary respectively across the first half of F1 2024, McLaren have a great chance to secure their first Constructors’ title since 1998 – and their first Championship of any kind since 2008 – in the coming months.

And with Mercedes winning three of the last four races prior to the summer break, Hill believes the rules are having the desired effect.

He added: “Of course, it’s no good [the rulemakers] just saying: ‘Let everyone catch up.’ If they don’t know what they’re doing, they won’t catch up.

“They are obviously earning those positions, they’re earning the right to challenge for victories.

“[The rise of] McLaren notably, and also the recovery of Mercedes, has been pretty dramatic since [technical director] James Allison announced: ‘How could we have been so stupid?’

“They’ve got their little tweak, whatever it is that they’ve done, to make the car work. It’s all starting to [close up now].

“Ferrari are the only people who have got into a little bit of a vortex and going around in circles without really getting further ahead.

“But [convergence] is coming so it’s great to see.”

Hill’s comments come after Red Bull engineer Calum Nicholas dismissed a theory that a tweak to the regulations, related to a clever braking system, is behind the RB20’s struggles as a “bull***.”

Taking to Twitter, Nicholas argued that the likes of McLaren and Mercedes should be praised for closing the gap to Red Bull.

He wrote: “The only reason I care about this stuff is because, really, people should just be giving the other teams the credit they deserve for putting in the work and catching up.

“Not everything has to be some big conspiracy.”

In an interview with PlanetF1.com at last month’s Belgian Grand Prix, chief engineer Paul Monaghan insisted that Red Bull have done nothing to “make the car particularly bad” since the start of the season.

Asked what has changed since April’s Chinese Grand Prix, where Verstappen won comfortably from pole position, Monaghan replied: “That’s a question we’ve posed to ourselves a few times, as you may well imagine.

“A surprisingly small amount has altered in terms of our car. The characteristics, as you have often heard us engineering types talk about, haven’t really altered.

“We have revised the bodywork a few times, putting more load into it, trying to make it more efficient.

“There’s nothing we see that in our research tools or what we bring back from running, which says we’ve made it worse or we’ve missed our targets.

“But it doesn’t mean that we can’t look again and be thorough to say: is the car actually better? Or have we rearranged it a bit with a similar lap time and just made it more difficult?

“That’s an ongoing process. Whatever we find is subtle, it’s not gargantuan. It’s not to say: ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve made an absolute mess of this or that.’

“It’s chipping away for a few tenths per lap, and if you then take an average circuit with 15 corners – if we miss one or two tenths, if you look at that distributed around the lap, it’s minutiae.

“So I don’t think there’s anything we’ve done to make the car particularly bad.”

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