While McLaren appears to have started the season on the right foot, positioning itself as a potential reference team on the grid, picking up right where it left off last year, the situation behind Woking’s team is much more tangled, with less clear performance figures. Pre-season testing is already complex to analyze, but this year’s variables have added further uncertainty.
The significant temperature swings—ranging from struggling to reach 20°C on the first two days to peaking at 33°C on Friday—made it difficult to compare the most valuable test data, particularly the race simulations.
Beyond this, however, there is an intriguing topic worth exploring: the RB21, which became the mystery subject of the tests. Twelve months ago, Red Bull left Bahrain with a lot of enthusiasm and newfound certainties, fully aware that it had a car that had emerged as the clear “winter queen,” as shown in the first four races.
Fast forward a year, and the Milton Keynes team finds itself in a completely opposite situation, with more doubts than certainties. The excitement of the first day, when Helmut Marko explained how many of the issues faced with the RB20 had been resolved, even pushing Max Verstappen—usually reserved about giving opinions—to comment positively, gave way to uncertainty by the end of testing.
The Key Focus Was Understanding the Car
The RB21 holds many more secrets than it might appear on the surface. In reality, it’s more of a “corrected” version of the RB20 than an actual evolution. The complicated cooling system that limited development last year was abandoned in favor of simpler solutions, opening up new possibilities. Additionally, the floor—arguably the most critical area—was revised to reduce gaps in the aerodynamic map, aiming to make the car more balanced and less twitchy.
The engineers hoped to find a more stable and understandable platform, even at the cost of some performance. Thus, the first day and a half were mainly dedicated to correlation tests and extreme setup variations. To carry out these measurements, the team chose to maintain a consistent program in terms of time length, with the only variable being setup changes or tire compound adjustments.
In essence, the first two days were spent running a “standard” car—essentially a corrected base version of the RB20—to understand whether the changes made to the new car had met the intended development goals. Once the base understanding was clear, updates like a modified front wing and reworked floor were introduced, so it’s no surprise that part of the morning on the third day was again dedicated to short runs for aerodynamic measurements.
However, not all the updates provided the hoped-for answers. The first day gave the most convincing feedback, while by Thursday, the team struggled to find the ideal window they had hoped to widen. The difficulties continued into the final day, and Pierre Waché, Red Bull’s technical director, admitted that the tests had not gone entirely as expected.
“It wasn’t as smooth a test as we had hoped, but it’s better to find issues here than later on, in order to understand the car. We didn’t have the time we wanted, but we tried to explore the car’s potential and see how it responds to different setups, and I think we more or less succeeded,” Pierre Wache said.
“I’m not as happy as I’d like to be, because the car didn’t respond as we wanted at some points, but we are going in the right direction, although perhaps not as broadly as we expected. This is something we need to work on before the first race and for future development.”
Especially on the final day, there was a sense that the car was understeering on entry but also tending toward oversteer on exit. This could be partly explained by more rigid setup experiments and the car’s inherent characteristics. The RB21 likely doesn’t have the sharp peaks of performance it did last year, but it’s still challenging to get it working optimally within its ideal window.
When this balance is lost and the engineers cannot find what they call the “sweet spot,” the 2025 car begins to show signs of the imbalance seen in previous seasons.
The Analytical Work Sacrificed Long Runs
It wasn’t until the afternoon of the second day that Red Bull temporarily set aside setup work to conduct long runs with Lawson, although they did not complete a full race simulation. This was necessary to allow the New Zealander to accumulate mileage, especially after a water pressure issue in the morning kept him in the pits.
However, once the two long runs were completed, Red Bull returned to extreme setup experiments, pushing the car to see how far it could go. On the third day, the team again applied flow-vis paint to the car, indicating they were still seeking answers.
Ultimately, time ran out in Bahrain, and the Anglo-Austrian team probably didn’t find all the answers it was looking for, even sacrificing a race simulation with Max Verstappen. It’s no secret that Red Bull relies heavily on track testing, even during race weekends, to validate its setup, so everything tested falls within the framework of understanding the package rather than seeking pure performance.
The general feeling is that, although Red Bull has somewhat widened its operating window, the RB21 still requires significant tuning to unlock its full potential, which could make it a dark horse in the early part of the season. This is a crucial issue because this analytical work lays the foundation for the development of future updates for the car.
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