Red Bull upgrade impact assessed as kerb-riding weakness addressed

Max Verstappen drives the Red Bull RB20.

Red Bull’s Paul Monaghan has spoken about the challenge the Milton Keynes-based squad is facing in overcoming its kerb-riding weakness.

While the Red Bull RB20 may still be F1’s outright quickest car, the machine has proven tricky to tame over kerbs – leading to tougher competition at race tracks upon which the kerbs must be attacked in order to do quick laptimes.

Paul Monaghan opens up on Red Bull updates

Additional reporting by Sam Cooper.

Red Bull has had a tougher run of things in recent races, having only managed a sixth place in Monaco with Max Verstappen before the team’s operational sharpness rescued a likely defeat to McLaren’s Lando Norris as Verstappen couldn’t keep pace with the British driver during the first half of the Canadian Grand Prix.

Showing up with updates to the RB20 that have seen revised sidepod inlets aimed at exploiting higher pressure inlet air for hotter races, and using the fewest number of exit louvres, Red Bull’s chief engineer Paul Monaghan said the relatively minor updates are anything but.

“You’d be surprised how sensitive I daresay everybody is – you start opening holes in the back of the bodywork and you spill, tumbling dirty air towards beam wings, floor edges, that type of thing and it hurts,” he told media, including PlanetF1.com, ahead of the Spanish Grand Prix.

“The sensitivity to aerodynamics around here is high enough that you’re gonna have a grid slot or two if you get it wrong. We’re in a tight fight with these guys and our scope to change the car is not as free as it perhaps used to be.

“So, wherever we can make a gain, – particularly like the likes of here or Silverstone, off we go, yes, it’s valid.”

More on the latest Red Bull F1 news

Red Bull and Ferrari upgrades revealed ahead of crucial Spanish GP test

‘Lot harder with Red Bull dominating’ – Silverstone boss points to Max Verstappen as British GP tickets remain

Paul Monaghan: Red Bull will keep chipping away at kerb weakness

Asked how much of a priority it is for Red Bull to address the kerb-riding weakness that has made the team’s life more difficult at several races this season, Monaghan said the aim is to create a car that is simply the quickest over a lap.

“We intend to try and address any performance limitation in the car, so we don’t do one in deference to another,” he said.

“You see the bodywork – you don’t see what we bury inside, we keep it away from prying eyes.

“That’s an ongoing development and we will chip away in whatever magnitude we can relatively achieve race by race.

“So this place [Barcelona] might not be so bad for us. We’ll see what we can do.

“Hungary has got a few hasn’t it? Austria has got plenty of kerbs we’ve always enjoyed so we’re not resting. We just have to have a car that rides relatively that, over a lap, is the quickest.

“It should be better everywhere.

“Whether we’ve got enough here to get through a warm Hungary – 135 degrees at relatively slow speed. We’ll find out and then we’ll see what we need to do.”

As for how difficult the issue is likely to be for Red Bull to overcome, Monaghan laughed.

“It’s not impossible. I don’t know how to say how difficult is it,” he said.

“If it was easy, we might have already done it. It’s not going to be easy. The magnitude of the problem – I look at other cars riding the kerbs, they hit them, launch the thing in the air – we do the same.

“The question is can we make a big enough improvement to be quicker than our opposition? That’s the challenge. The answer is that we don’t know how – we’ve just got to do the best we can in this incremental process, race by race.”

Read Next: Lance Stroll handed FIA summons after fan activity ‘non-attendance’ at Spanish GP