How summer downgrade saved Racing Bulls from complacency

A lot of attention has gone to Ferrari and the cursed Barcelona floor upgrade that sent it back to the drawing board over the summer, but behind the Scuderia in F1’s midfield RB suffered a similar fate.

After an encouraging start RB also introduced a new floor at June’s Spanish Grand Prix, an upgrade which actually turned out to make the car slower. The team paid the price against increasingly competitive competition from Haas and belatedly Alpine as it slipped behind both to eighth, equalling its result from 2023.

The team was also forced into another mid-season driver change with Liam Lawson taking over from Danial Ricciardo after Singapore, but the changes didn’t stop there for Red Bull’s junior team.

While results have been stagnant in 2024, the team’s management is adamant its mid-season blip may actually have been a blessing in disguise and reinforced the idea that the revamp team principal Laurent Mekies and CEO Peter Bayer have been embarking on really was long overdue, and that the Anglo-Italian team couldn’t continue the way it goes about developing its cars.

“We had a big, big setback in race 10. We felt we had brought load on the car, but it was not making the car faster. It was making the car slower,” Mekies told Autosport.

“I think [it] was a necessary pain to go through, because it really forced us to say: ‘What do we miss structurally that produced this sort of step back?’ And it forced us to accelerate the changes that we were trying to make.

Laurent Mekies, Team Principal, RB F1 Team, Liam Lawson, RB F1 Team

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

“I think race 10 saved us from being complacent about where we were. It was a good wake-up call to say there is no way the way it’s being done now is going to be good enough.”

When asked to describe what RB’s reorganisation process looks like, Mekies’ explanation sounds similar to what McLaren’s Andrea Stella has done at his squad – ensuring the right people are in the right place and have the right technical structure to express themselves, without being blocked by being stuck in silos or mired in bureaucracy.

“It’s a bit of everything, honestly. At first, it’s process. We have made a conscious effort to try to put our people in an environment where they could express themselves best. And that meant changing the structures, changing in the approach, changing the processes. It takes a bit of time to re-gel but that’s the main thing.

“And what is then happening is that those people are in the centre of the project, and it is them that then create the tools that you need to have, the better analysis that you need to not fall into this trap. So I could answer to you, it’s tools. But in reality, the tools are the consequence of how your people are performing in their environment. It starts with people.”

In January, RB is also moving from its old and cramped Bicester outpost into its new building in Milton Keynes, down the road form parent team Red Bull’s campus, which will replace Bicester as its UK headquarters to serve alongside its old Minardi base in Faenza.

“We approached the season with two parallel streams,” Mekies explained. “On one side we had to get the car out following late development last year into Abu Dhabi. The car at the beginning of the season was very close to the car you have seen in Abu Dhabi. There has been some progress in the winter, but we certainly felt it would not be enough to be where we want it to be.

“And then in parallel to that, you are doing quite a deep change into the structure, into the way we are working, into the processes, because we are starting the process to hopefully build the team to do something that can target bigger fish.

Yuki Tsunoda, RB F1 Team VCARB 01, Daniel Ricciardo, RB F1 Team VCARB 01, Alex Albon, Williams FW46

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

“Did the Barcelona [upgrade] cost us? Yes, it did. It took us until race 17 or 18 to have a fix, and in that time you have dropped [in competitiveness]. So I think what is a necessary pain is the fact that as a group, we went through that process – accept, understand, fix – which is the core of our sport.

“But I insist it’s not about a silver bullet of the development. It’s really about having that approach in every single area of the car. Let it be the tyres, the starts, the pitstops, or whatever. But that was a very good example for how we want the core group to stick together when we hit a difficulty. I really feel that in terms of what it has forced us to do internally, it was positive.”

Mekies acknowledges there will be “many other road blocks of that type along the way” as the teams fights to get the front of the midfield group behind Aston Martin. The team now has the full complement of allowed customer parts from bigger sibling Red Bull, which includes both front and rear suspension, as well as the gearbox, allowing it to focus on gains in other areas.

Lawson has been promoted to Red Bull’s main team, with Isack Hadjar the latest Red Bull junior the team will get to take under its wing alongside the now experienced Yuki Tsunoda.

Mekies adds: “Is this the end point? No, absolutely not. We have long way to go still in terms of improving our tools, improving our process, improving our analysis to be able to be more protective. It would also be wrong for us to think that it’s just about the race 10 update.

“The reality is that in these months, we have made progress on many other things that have nothing to do with aerodynamics, on which we had to make steps forward, and we still have to make steps forward.”