In Formula 1 history, only two cars have been close to delivering a complete whitewash, with McLaren’s MP4/4 and Red Bull’s RB19 dominating their respective campaigns.

In both cases, they missed out on the clean sweep by just one race victory; Red Bull took 21 victories in 22 races, whilst having to deal with a packed calendar that also featured six Sprint events – they won five of those, too.

Generational talent

The RB19, as the successor to a championship-winning machine, was an evolution of its predecessor. However, standing still in Formula 1 is not an option, so although there was a healthy dose of the RB18’s DNA to be seen, in many ways, the RB19 was a leap forward.

The second year in a new regulatory phase is always going to lead to some new ideas appearing, but it’s also an opportunity for teams to take what they’ve learnt from the previous campaign and improve on aspects of the car’s design that are essentially locked in.

In this instance Red Bull had identified the front axle line to be one of those, as not only does it have mechanical ramifications from a suspension point of view, it also has an influence over the surrounding aerodynamic flow field, both of which can contribute to tyre performance.

Red Bull moved the front axle line on the RB19 a little further forward than its predecessor, altering how the front wing influences the wake generated by the front wheel assemblies and how that interacts downstream with critical design aspects, such as the floor and sidepods.

The low slung rear leg of the upper wishbone design was retained and acted as both a means to help stabilise the car’s platform under braking and place the element in a more advantageous position from an aerodynamic perspective, something which has become a major theme with this generation of car (arrowed).

In and around that portion of the car, Red Bull took the opportunity to further reduce the cross section in the lower half of the chassis. Having already created a taper in the lower corner of the RB18’s chassis to improve aerodynamic efficiency, it took it a step further in 2023 and created more of a V-shaped profile, which undoubtedly resulted in a redesign of the nose too.

Red Bull had gone through a significant amount of change to its front brake arrangement in 2022, as it looked for the right balance of brake cooling whilst being mindful of how to use heat transfer to the wheel rim and, in-turn, alter the bulk temperature of the tyre, to improve the performance and reduce degradation of the tyres.

Those changes culminated in a revised layout for 2023, with an enlarged fairing used to encapsulate the brake disc, whilst attention was also paid to the design of the caliper, with small tube fins used to allow for a reduction in size and weight of the assembly whilst still retaining the requisite cooling potential.

Pod racers

The sidepods have been one of the most talked about aspects of this generation of cars, mainly because they’re a very visible component, making them easy to differentiate one design concept from another.

Alpine, Alpha Tauri, and Red Bull all chose the downwash ramp-style solution from the get-go, while the likes of Ferrari and Mercedes opted for very different concepts.

But, whilst the entire grid began to converge on a similar arrangement, there were also a select few that broke away and incorporated water slide-style gullies on the upper surface of the sidepod, in a similar fashion to a design first employed by Alpine, albeit Red Bull stayed the course and instead opted to improve its inlet design instead.

Rather than having a conventional opening for the intake, Red Bull had considered how it could improve flow conditions around the sidepod undercut and incorporated an underbite solution.

It was this solution that it’d focus development resources on for 2023, with the first modification arriving at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix (lower left inset, below), when it raised the underbite’s lip but widened the bodywork to maintain the inlet’s aspect ratio.

It took this design concept further still at the Hungarian Grand Prix (main image), as it raised the lip once more and widened the opening and bodywork to form more of a letterbox-shaped inlet.

There were changes to the engine cover too, with the rear outlet reimagined to create a more downward facing nozzle. Alongside these changes, the shark fin was elongated, whilst the outlet along the cover’s spine had to be shortened to suit.

The floor on this generation of cars, and more specifically the underfloor, is the most important design aspect and often shrouded in intrigue as we don’t see them unless a car has a crash or failure and is craned away from the circuit.

In the case of the RB18 and RB19 it was mostly evolution, rather than radical changes being applied, although there had to be a change in approach when it came to the floor’s edge, as some subtle changes to the regulations forced teams to largely abandon the ‘Ice skate’ solution that Red Bull had popularised.

This led to Red Bull adopting a more traditional edge wing design, with the team employing the space that it’d previously cut away.

The edge wing was modified as part of an update package at the Hungarian Grand Prix, with the team introducing a series of strakes on the underside, which were reminiscent of a solution we’d already seen rivals, Mercedes, introduce.

Meanwhile, the edge wing’s upper surface was twisted along its length, creating an upturned profile that would later feature some additional vanes to help control how the airflow spilled around the assembly.

It’s a design feature that’s stood the test of time, with many teams adopting similar solutions thereafter, along with the C-shaped profile in both the floor and the edge wing, which stacked on top of one another make up tandem winglets.

Although the underfloor is clearly a massive contributing factor in the design of the current generation of cars it’s all for nought if the diffuser’s design doesn’t make use of it. And, in Red Bull’s case, it made a change to the design fairly early-on in the season, having by their own admission taken inspiration from Williams, which had fielded a similar solution.

The design solution in question first appeared on the RB19 at the Spanish Grand Prix, with the upper corner of the diffuser pinched inward (arrow). This resulted in the ceiling section having to be adjusted too, with a narrower but longer expansion channel near the trailing edge introduced that required a ramped section on the upper surface.

Red Bull gives you wings, but not too many…

In previous eras, without budget and resource restrictions, Red Bull often designed a raft of different front and rear wing solutions, not only as a means to cater for the various downforce levels required during the course of a season but also as a way of generally increasing performance.

And, whilst it still had a number of choices designed to balance the car’s performance front-to-rear, there were no real conceptual changes enacted.

Red Bull did take advantage of solutions seen elsewhere though, adding a blade-style winglet in the outboard corner of the front wing, whilst it followed in the footsteps of some of its rivals when adopting an open-ended flap tip section on the rear wing in Singapore.

Creating discontinuity in this region not only alters the design of the tip section, it also changes the rear cutout and provides designers with a new set of parameters when it comes to drag and downforce that can be generated by the wing. In Red Bull’s case, it opted to use the open-ended arrangement with higher downforce configurations in order to reduce drag.

This leads us onto the teams approach when it came to lower downforce arrangements, of which Red Bull concentrated less on during the season, instead focusing its efforts on balancing downforce and drag levels by altering its beam wing arrangement.

More often than not, this resulted in just a single, lower element being employed, whilst a rear wing more consistent with a higher downforce configuration was installed.

In order to limit its resource exposure, the team also chose not to create a bespoke low downforce configuration for Monza, as is traditionally the case, as it obviously considered it a fairly negligible gain, instead opting to trim a large section of the upper flap’s trailing edge away.

This did leave them a little exposed when compared with their rivals though, as whilst the lowest downforce rear wing has traditionally only been used at Monza, teams now also add Las Vegas into the equation, as it has similar characteristics.

In that instance, it added a Gurney to the trailing edge, to improve balance, as can be seen on the image above.

There was little else of note added to the RB19 in the remaining races of the season, with the team only making some changes to the cooling arrangement for Mexico in order to deal with altitude concerns.

There hadn’t really been any need for a late development surge in any case, as the RB19 was a machine that had enough in reserve to crown Red Bull as Constructor’s champions in Japan and Max Verstappen as World Drivers Champion, just a round later in Qatar.