Red Bull revealed that the creation of the RB18 had been complicated, in particular because the technical team did not know if the concept was successful. Having to move forward without knowing what the competition was doing wasn’t easy, but the first few tries were reassuring.
« I guess under new regulations it’s always hard to know if you’ve done the right thing or not » explained Rob Marshall, Red Bull’s engineering director, to the F1 Nation podcast.
« I think we got to the first test, and we found that actually what we did wasn’t too far off the pace. We didn’t seem to be struggling in some areas that other people clearly had problems, and many continued to have them. »
« I don’t think it’s a great design triumph. But we certainly avoided some design banana skins, and everything that other teams slipped on. »
Marshall notes that the big difficulty of this concept was the fact of having to start from scratch compared to the RB16B of 2021: « There was not a single nut or bolt carried over to the car. »
« The aero rules were different, the chassis rules were completely different, there was a new suspension, a new gearbox, there was nothing you could really say to yourself ‘this part is good, so at least we don’t have to worry about it that. »
« It was all potentially a disaster but thankfully nothing was and over the course of the year we were able to iron out some of the little issues we had and build on that. »
A “wonderful” development program
For the development of the RB18, Red Bull tried to figure out how to get their car as close to the ground as possible without being too low, which has been the problem for Mercedes F1 in particular this year, with a car impossible to get away from the asphalt.
« They are different beasts. You only have to look at last year’s to realize that one of our main concerns was ride height,” said Paul Monaghan, chief engineer in the design of the project.
« Compared to the Mercedes, we were much higher on the rear ride height, like most other people. Now you have a ground effect car, which needs to be close to the ground, but you don’t cannot be too close to the ground, and must operate over a speed range where it generates downforce. »
« You have tires that smash under loads, so we’re high at low speeds and low at high speeds. We’re trying to keep the whole rig low to the ground. It’s a ground effect car, that’s no surprise. »
« We’ve been fighting with a wonderful development program, very capable people, to have a car that can cope. We seem to be on a good development path, so we have to keep our heads down and keep pushing forward. »
Adrian Newey, the designer of the RB18, is happy that its main flaw could be quickly corrected: « It has become one of those dream seasons. At the beginning it was very close with Ferrari.
« They were faster at some circuits, we were faster at others. We had an inherent understeer in the car which we managed to eliminate and by improving that we managed to have a car that was competitive on all circuits.
