The technical director of the Milton Keynes team, Pierre Wacheadmitted that Red Bull can having reached a ceiling with the development of its 2024 Formula 1 caralthough he suggested that they had not reached the general limit of the regulations. The team established itself as the benchmark in the last technical era, with Max Verstappen dominating, but its rivals, above all McLaren, Mercedes and Ferrari, began to reduce the advantage that they had enjoyed since the last Grand Prix in Miami.
There, Lando Norris achieved his first victory, while his teammate, Oscar Piastri, as well as George Russell, Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc managed to win later, to which we must add the victory of Carlos Sainz in the Australian Grand Prix at the beginning of the year.
When asked by Motorsport.com in a exclusive interview Asked whether the RB20 had performed as he and the team had hoped since winter testing, he said: “I would say not really. We have improved compared to last year, for sure, but we have not delivered what we expected in some areas, especially in the high-speed corners, we were expecting a bit more than we got.”
“Without thinking about the competitiveness of the car, just based on our own references, we expected a bit more with our tools,” explained Pierre Wache. “I think some aspects may be due to correlation, we are using a fairly old wind tunnel, and it may also be related to the reduced capacity due to our position in the championship. [ATR]and perhaps the fact that this is the third year with the technical rules.”
On If Red Bull began to hit a ceiling in terms of its developmentadmitted: “Our roof [con un concepto específico] “Maybe, but that doesn’t mean it’s the general ceiling. In this business you also take ideas from others, and for the last few years, people did it with ours, but you need others to find things too to take a step, I think that’s starting to happen now, and it gives you a different limit.”
Max Verstappen breaks the record for wins in a single seasonwhen he won 19 of the 23 races last season, even ten of them coming in a row, and many expected that dominance to continue, but since the Miami Grand Prix, it has not been easy for the Dutchman: “I think we expected our rivals to catch up with us sooner.”
“When we started the 2022 season, we didn’t have the fastest car. Ferrari had the fastest car at the beginning of that year, and we were expecting tough competition in 2023, but that wasn’t the case,” he continued. “We also expected the rivals to be there more or less from the start. [de 2024]we expected the others to be very close because the performance that can be found in the car is limited by the same rules.”
“After the first four or five races, the others came back, perhaps with a delay and a little bit of a lag, but the truth is that we expected it from the beginning,” he said. before being asked if the gap was reduced by the improvements of others or by Red Bull’s slower progress.“The limitations you have with these rules are quite high and what you can find to take further steps is increasingly difficult. Afterwards, it is almost certain that, since you maintain the same rules, the rivals will return at some point.”
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