Red Bull’s Austin F1 update reversed balance issues at cost of ‘overall potential’

Red Bull’s floor update for the 2024 United States Grand Prix came at the expense of ultimate car “potential” but removed many of the correlation and balance issues that affected its RB20, according to technical director Pierre Wache.

The development direction of the RB20 hit a problematic streak at the tail end of the European season last year, culminating in a difficult Monza weekend at the start of September where it finished sixth and eighth.

This led to Max Verstappen stating at the following Baku weekend that Red Bull would be putting further planned developments “in the bin” with the intent of reserving the team’s waning form.

Wache says the Austin upgrade that appeared over a month later set the wheels in motion to reverse the arrears and explained that, although this lowered what Red Bull perceived as the RB20’s ultimate ceiling, it delivered more instantly accessible performance.

This was despite the apparent declaration of a small upgrade in the FIA’s pre-event technical documentation that reveals the new parts that teams have introduced at a given weekend.

“We modified the floor and could remove some correlation issues,” Wache told Motorsport.com. “It came with a loss of the overall car potential, but we massively improved the correlation and a lot of balance characteristics.

“But as I have said before, it is not enough yet. The package did exactly what we wanted. The aero department did a very good job on that.

“It means that our understanding of the issues was correct and that we moved into the right direction.

“It doesn’t mean that we have fixed everything, but at least we have improved the balance characteristics a lot.

“The FIA document just applies to the shape and the parts that you changed, that doesn’t mean the characteristics and the number of downforce points that you have gained from those changes. 

“The upgrade package was bigger, although I don’t know what the others have done. But we told the truth: we modified the floor, we found a big delta in terms of load, and we correlated it a lot better to the wind tunnel.”

Wache explained that Verstappen had previously been able to mitigate the balance issues with his driving, but the low-downforce nature of Monza exposed the RB20’s true issues.

The Frenchman felt that it was ‘positive’ to endure a difficult weekend to ensure Red Bull could start moving in the right direction for the final flyaway rounds.

“I think it is clear that when you have a balance issue and start to reduce the downforce, the underlying balance starts to become even more dominant for the lap time and the feeling of the driver,” Wache contended.

“That is especially true for the driver we have in Max. He can filter quite a lot of those balance issues with his talent. 

“It is clear that a low-downforce track reduces the possibility for a driver to filter these balance issues.

“In some ways that weekend has been very positive for us, because it massively highlighted the problems we had.”

Despite Verstappen’s assertion that the expected upgrades were canned after Monza, Wache says Red Bull was “already working” on the balance problems faced by the team – and Austin merely vindicated its findings.