Many expect a four-way battle in 2025, with the top four teams engaged in an intense and fierce fight. The track will ultimately decide the winner and whether it truly becomes a four-way contest, but Red Bull is certainly looking for redemption after a 2024 season with too many highs and lows.
The weapon to defend the drivers’ title won by Max Verstappen is the RB21, which was unveiled today online by the Milton Keynes team while the car is physically running on track during a filming day in Sakhir. Tomorrow, the pre-season tests will also begin there, where Max Verstappen will share driving duties with his new teammate, Liam Lawson.
Expectations are high for the RB21 within the Red Bull camp from its very first kilometers, as the latest creation from Milton Keynes must not only be a fast car but also one that is easy for both drivers and engineers to interpret. Despite the RB20 starting the 2024 season with clear superiority over its rivals, its development path became increasingly complicated.
Not only did competitors close the gap with targeted and effective updates, especially McLaren, but Red Bull itself struggled to find the right development direction for the RB20, with many upgrades failing to deliver the expected results. Last year’s car proved to be quite complex, both in design philosophy and in areas such as its intricate four-stage cooling system.
Throughout 2024, discrepancies emerged between data from CFD simulations, wind tunnel testing, the simulator, and real-world performance. Engineers quickly noticed downforce deficiencies in certain areas of the aerodynamic map defining airflow behavior, leading to imbalances that made the car unpredictable in corners.
With the RB21, one of Milton Keynes’ primary goals is to address these issues, making the car not only more competitive overall but also more effective across a wider range of circuits.
“The main objective is to strike a balance between making the car faster than the competition and ensuring it is pleasant to drive so that the drivers can extract the maximum performance from it. It is known that increasing the operating window can reduce the overall potential,” explained Pierre Waché, Red Bull’s technical director.
“In 2023, we proved that our direction was correct because we were faster than everyone else. Last season, it was proven that it was not.”
From a technical standpoint, Red Bull has tried to conceal many details at the launch with darkened images, but it is evident that the RB21 incorporates several solutions from last year’s car. The nose extends to the first element, and the cooling inlets for the radiators resemble those of the RB20, with a vertical intake complementing the horizontal “letterbox” intake below the overbite.
Interestingly, this launch version has abandoned the prominent cooling cannons on the upper part of the engine cover, just behind the cockpit, in favor of a solution similar to the one introduced in mid-2024, which can be alternated depending on track characteristics. The floor, unsurprisingly, has been carefully hidden using shadows, but it remains one of the areas where the Milton Keynes engineers have focused the most.
Leave a Reply