Red Bull might be dominating Formula 1 at the moment thanks to the technical genius of Adrian Newey, but the designer of the RB20 insists that the squad must continue to make progress - especially in the less obvious areas.
Given the team's domination of F1 in 2023, many pundits had expected Red Bull to take it easy this season and make few changes to a winning formula.
Instead, Newey has surprised them with some very obvious upgrades to this year's contender, which looks a lot closer to last year's 'zero sidepod' design tried out but eventually dropped by Mercedes.
Such a striking change has been the talk of the paddock, but Newey says that it's the less obvious elements under the skin of the car that are making the biggest contribution to the team's flying start to the new season.
"The visual change is actually much larger than the performance change you get from that", he told the F1 Nation podcast this week.
“The bits that are visible, that have caused quite a lot of attention, obviously we’re pursuing aerodynamic gains there," he acknowledged. "The other, much more subtle bits people haven't noticed are probably responsible for a bigger gain.
“The underlying architecture of the car is the third-generation evolution of what started as the RB18," he continued.
"That's where, apart from the radiators, we carry everything: the layout of the front suspension, the rear suspension, the gearbox, the casing, [so the RB20] is a third evolution of the RB18."
Red Bull won all but one race last year with 19 victories for Max Verstappen and two for his team mate Sergio Perez. But it's clear that missing out on a clean sweep by losing in Singapore to Ferrari's Carlos Sainz still rankles.
“What we’ve tried to achieve is a car that is reasonably well-suited to all circuits,” Newey confirmed. “Typically, last year the circuits that we had less of an advantage on were the maximum downforce street tracks.
“Singapore, obviously, we famously made a bit of a mess of and underperformed to what we could have achieved," he admitted. "We could have certainly achieved podiums there had we got our act together a bit better.
"It's certainly true to say that those circuits are the ones that we probably have less advantage on," he said. "But as long as we're not disastrous on them, then maybe that's good enough.”
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