Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has revealed a 20-kilogram weight saving with the all-conquering RB19 was the catalyst to Max Verstappen’s crushing dominance of the 2023 F1 season.
The car carried Red Bull to a record-breaking year that included winning 21 of the 22 grands prix, with 19 by Verstappen en route to the 26-year-old and the team retaining their drivers’ and constructors’ titles.
Key to Red Bull and Verstappen sweeping away their rivals was the fact the team was able to trim away a considerable amount from what Horner has described was a “chunky” RB18.
Explaining why the RB19 was so dominant, speaking to selected media, including Speedcafe, Horner said: “What you have to remember is that with 19, there were a large amount of components that came from the 18, so gearbox, a large percentage of the suspension, half of the chassis.
“It was effectively a cut-and-shut for this year.
“The most significant thing that we were able to address was the weight because we were so late going on to the new regs in ’21, because of that championship battle, that the car in ’22 was a bit on the chunky side.
“So, we managed to get 20 kilos out of the car coming into this year and tidy up some of the imperfections.
“But there were a great many carryover parts. Some of the components have won, in Max’s case, 19 races this year and 15 last year, so the combination of the two – 34 races.”
As to where the team made the weight savings, Horner replied: “It was a little bit everywhere.
“It was not one specific area that you could take the weight off. It was just marginal gains in all areas.
“I think that was probably the fundamental difference between the 2022 car and the 2023 car.”
Confirming the RB18 was 20 kilos over the weight limit in 2022, as teams attempted to get on top of the new ground-effect regulations that had been introduced at the start of that season, Horner said: “Yeah, we were carrying that deficit for a large percentage of the year.”
The only blemish on Red Bull’s near-perfect record was the Singapore Grand Prix where neither Verstappen nor team-mate Sergio Perez could hook the car up around the Marina Bay Street Circuit.
Verstappen’s performance was so off-key that he failed to get out of Q2, with the Dutch driver pipped to a place in the top 10 by AlphaTauri’s Liam Lawson by 0.007secs, whilst Perez started 13th.
The duo at least made inroads in the race, finishing fifth and eighth respectively, yet for Verstappen, the defeat ended his record run of 10 consecutive victories.
Reflecting on the lack of performance that weekend, Horner said: “That race just brings everything into reality.
“Quite often we made winning look easy this year. Winning is never easy, and that race just brought it home that if you miss the target, it’s small margins.
“We arrived with a setup, led down a route by our simulation tools, and it just didn’t work on that circuit on that day, particularly in qualifying. In the race, the pace started to come back to us.
“If we’d known what we knew after the event going into it, we would have been in a much more competitive position.”
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