RB had high hopes when it introduced a significant upgrade package for its VCARB 01 at last June’s Spanish Grand Prix, but the team has since identified the reason why its development fell short of expectations.
The Barcelona updates, aimed at solidifying RB’s position in the constructors' championship, were designed to elevate its car’s performance and address specific areas needing improvement, such as stability and balance.
But instead, the changes created new challenges, and compelled the team to initiate an extensive process to identify the root cause of the underperformance.
Initial suspicions pointed to a fluttering rear wing, but further analysis revealed that the real culprit was the new floor design introduced as part of the upgrade package.
"We had an update targeting certain benefits,” RB technical director Jody Egginton told Motorsport.com.
“We're still trying to get all the headline load improvements, but we were focusing a little bit still to get a bit more brake entry stability, a bit more rotation in the car, all the normal things."
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However, the team quickly realized that they hadn’t been able to extract the expected performance gains from the new package. Despite achieving the anticipated load improvements, the upgrade negatively impacted the car's balance, particularly in through-corner and through-speed phases.
"As a package, it was clear that we hadn't been able to extract everything from it, and although the load that we anticipated was there, we'd sort of decoupled the car in through-corner and through-speed balance more than we wanted," Egginton noted.
This decoupling meant that while the car generated the expected aerodynamic load, the trade-off was a loss of balance, which hindered overall performance.
The team's response was swift. They decided to roll back the floor update on one of their cars during the Austrian Grand Prix to conduct a back-to-back comparison.
Given that the Spielberg weekend was a sprint event with a unique parc ferme window, this allowed the team to experiment over two stages.
"There was no doubt that the load was in the package but, trading load against balance, we were not able to access that performance,” Egginton added.
“So we took the decision immediately to roll one car back and do a back-to-back in Austria - it was a two-stage experiment because the parc ferme window this year in sprint races opens up twice.
“We had two goes at it, bottomed it out. And then for Silverstone, we had a baseline aero config and essentially we'd rolled back the floor.”
Despite the disappointment, Egginton remains optimistic about the lessons learned from the experience. He acknowledged that while the floor design didn’t work as intended, it still contained valuable insights that could inform future developments.
"The floor is a one-piece thing with bits of it we liked, bits of it we didn't. You don't get the choice to split it up," he said.
RB technical director Jody Egginton.
This means that while some aspects of the new floor were beneficial, the overall package failed to deliver the desired performance.
"You bring the update to the first event, you've got things you want to learn, but we delved straight into it, did our washing, found the answer and moved on. So I'm quite happy with the process," he said, adding that while the team was disappointed not to access all the performance potential, the experience was still valuable.
"A lot of learning from that floor that we're not running, which we'll apply to the next floor because some aspects of it we like," Egginton continued.
"Most teams have [rolled back] at one point or another. To believe that you can attain everything is naive - if you're trying to develop this aggressively, it's just how it is."
"I'd be concerned if every single part got retained! I'd question that as 'are we sure, do we want to look at that again?' Because experimentally the likelihood of that is low."
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