Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache says that the team's current run of domination within Formula 1 isn't down to just a couple of top people making technical decisions, or even Max Verstappen's performance in the cockpit.
Wache is seen as one of the team's biggest behind-the-scenes assets, along with chief technical officer Adrian Newey who has been credited for much of the unrivalled aero efficiency of the latest RB20 chassis.
But in an exclusive interview with RacingNews365, Wache downplayed how much of the current success was down to them and said it was also the result of hundreds of people working at the team's headquarters in Milton Keynes.
"Just to make it clear, it’s not the purpose of the technical leader that you are the man doing the concept," he said. “The main people working on the car are some people inside the team, they are working hard on that.
“The technical leader makes some decisions, but plenty of work is done by the team," he explained. "We [mustn't] dismiss the work of the full team. The main performance is coming from them, to be honest, not from two people.
"When I look at the technical team, we are talking about about 300 people. Those are all smart and very good people,” he stressed. “So again, coming back to that big group of people, you can't attribute the successes just to two people.
"You have to give the reward to the full team - with the team we have, and how we work together, how we trust each other, how we push an area to make it better.
“The team, we've changed a lot through the years," he acknowledged. "But we have the same type of mentality of people. Maybe it's stupid, what I'm going to say, that we don't enjoy winning [so much as] we hate losing.
“The main aspect [is that] after a win we are discussing what didn’t work, how we can improve," he continued. “When you see after the debrief it’s like if we lost! It’s the mentality of F1, it’s difficult to cope with.
"Adrian and I are both part of the team, so we have the same mentality as the rest of the team," he acknowledged. "Adrian will be more concentrated on the aerodynamic side, and I'm more on the mechanical side."
As well as working hard to maintain their place at the top of F1, Red Bull is also in a process of transition as it prepares to manufacture their own power units for the first time with Ford when new technical regulations come into effect in 2026.
Wache said that the issue of correlation - ensuring that the performance on track matches what the team had been expecting during the design and testing process - was foremost in their methodology.
“Clearly the work we are doing in the factory has to be on target from the first release to be the most efficient as possible," he said. "Since 2018-19 when we were not as good, we've developed more and more in this area."
As a result, Wache suggested that between 99 and 100 per cent of the data collected in the factory matches what it gets out on the track. That alone explains why they're so hard for their rivals to catch right now.
Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter
