Newey reveals key regulation change that 'helped' Red Bull weakness

The Red Bull RB19 has been one of the most dominant cars in thehistory of Formula 1, having taken 21 victories out of a possible22 during the 2023 season. Their pace advantage in the races was sofar superior of their rivals that it did not matter where theystarted in a Grand Prix, with Max Verstappen starting in 15th inthe Saudi Arabian GP and still managing to win ahead of SergioPerez. At the hands of Verstappen it managed to break win recordsthat were previously held by McLaren in 1988 with the MP4/4, whichtook 15 wins out of 16 during that year which gave them a winpercentage of 94%. By contrast the RB19 has a win percentage of95%, having also achieved 30 podiums out of a possible 42 betweenVerstappen and Sergio Perez. Newey: Our guys wanted to fight theregulation change Designer Adrian Newey has previously admittedthat he was "surprised" that Red Bull managed to achieve the levelsof success they did in 2023, even by his standards. Much of theirimproved performance came from a key regulation change in 2023,which was introduced to prevent the amount of porpoisingexperienced by the cars in 2022 when the switch to ground effectshappened. A 15mm increase in the rear floor and 10mm diffuserheight was mandated, which posed a challenge for teams as theylooked to retain aerodynamic performance in the high speed corners."The interesting thing about that was when the change was announcedlast year we were discussing it internally. Some of our guys weresaying, ‘no, we’ve got to really fight this’," Newey told The Race. "But I took the view that, actually, in the high-speed cornerslast year we were probably behind Ferrari. Our car was gettingitself into problems in the very high speed so actually that regchange might suit us so we didn’t really push against it too much."It turned out it seems it has suited us.” Design decision causedqualifying problems Although the RB19 achieved 14 poles in 2023, itwas not always the easiest in qualifying for Verstappen and Perez.The pair faced their fare share of problems which often put themfurther back on the grid than anticipated, but Newey says this ispartially due to a design decision made early on. "That’s just theway we’ve developed the car. We’ve tried to prioritise raceperformance more than qualifying," said Newey. "We made thatdecision back in ’21 when we were designing the car, to try toprioritise the race performance over one-lap performance. "It was adeliberate choice and we felt that if the overtaking was going tobecome easier then that presumably meant qualifying performancewould be slightly lower priority than in the past and it seems tohave worked out.”