Red Bull RB21 design hint dropped in FIA wind tunnel stance change verdict

The first clues as to what Red Bull may choose to do for its F1 2025 design have been hinted at by team boss Christian Horner.

With the Milton Keynes-based squad going through a drop-off in competitiveness this season, will the 2025 Red Bull be a clean sheet of paper design?

Christian Horner: Evolution, not revolution, for F1 2025

This year’s RB20 fell off the boil as others – particularly McLaren – went through a development path in which their tweaks and changes made very obvious gains in performance.

However, while Red Bull started the year in dominant fashion, its own development led the car in the wrong direction and to a car in which neither Max Verstappen nor Sergio Perez felt particularly comfortable.

While the issues have been spotted and addressed by way of targeted rollbacks and revised components, the stage of development of the car now isn’t as advanced as that of the McLaren and, as a result, both Verstappen and Red Bull are under pressure to land the titles in the face of a faster Lando Norris/McLaren combination.

Looking ahead to F1 2025, the final year of the current regulations, is Red Bull entering the season on the back foot and attempting to catch up to McLaren, or is it confident that its current design philosophy is enough to remain competitive as long as the current issues are fixed?

Speaking to Motorsport.com , team boss Christian Horner has revealed that a radical change won’t be made for what will be largely a season of looking ahead and preparing for the revolution of the F1 2026 technical and power unit regulations.

“In this business, you’re always juggling and you’ve got to put one foot in front of the other,” he said.

“You can’t project too far into the future. Long term in F1 is about two and a half months and, basically, what we learn this year is relevant to next year.

“So next year’s car will be an evolution of this year’s car. I mean, there’s many components of last year’s car that have been carried over into this year, because with the way the cost cap works, unless there’s significant performance upgrade, it doesn’t make sense [to change].”

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The ‘limiting’ wind tunnel factor

This year’s misstep in development has revealed how a correlation issue between the data generated by the Red Bull wind tunnel doesn’t correspond with the real-world handling of the RB20, with the aging Bedford wind tunnel facility now lagging behind revitalised facilities at Ferrari and McLaren, as well as the brand-new facility at Aston Martin.

Red Bull has a new wind tunnel in development, which won’t be up and running within the next 12 months, and Horner said the decision to commit to building a new one only came about once it was clear such projects wouldn’t be banned.

“We’ve always known the limitations of the tunnel,” he said.

“But I think as we’ve really started to push the aerodynamics of these cars now and you’re into really fine margins, then the limitations show themselves up.

“There was a point in time that wind tunnels could have been banned.

“There was a discussion about whether that was going to be the case, and whether CFD (computational fluid dynamics) would overtake it or not.

“Adrian [Newey] held off pushing for a new tunnel until there was clarity on that. But it got to a point where Aston Martin wanted a new tunnel and the FIA changed their stance.

“So it was a question of: ‘Look, we have to do this, and we have to do this now, because the regulations dictate that, within a cost cap, the tunnel that we’re running is grossly inefficient.’

“We’ve got a facility that is a 60-year-old wind tunnel. It is a relic of the Cold War.

“It’s been good enough to produce some fantastic cars for us over the years. But it has its limitations.

“So anything under five degrees [celsius], we can’t run it. Anything over 25 degrees, it becomes pretty unstable.”

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