SPORT Off-season : the most important time for Oracle Red Bull Racing?

The Formula 1 season couldn’t have got off to a better start for the defending champions, of which TAG Heuer is a partner. On Saturday 2 March 2024, Oracle Red Bull Racing drivers Max Verstappen and Sergio Pérez finished on the top two steps of the podium in Bahrain for the first Grand Prix of the season after a memorable race. Since this race, they have been dominating the standings.

For Oracle Red Bull Racing, that race has been going on over a much longer period of time before the season-opening race: a battle that takes place completely out of sight, waged between the world champion Team and rivals. Time might move at a different pace between seasons, but it doesn’t stand still and we can’t wait to see the outcome of the work going on to be the best.

F1 races are measured not only against the stopwatch, but trying to gain as much time as possible against your opponents. Just like a TAG Heuer timepiece, the amazing precision extends not only to the work being done by Max Verstappen and Sergio Pérez behind the wheel, but also to the engineering excellence from the Oracle Red Bull Racing Team who create such a complex but beautiful piece of machinery.

And that race against both time and opponents in F1 happens off the track as well as on it. So Oracle Red Bull Racing will be planning aspects of next year’s car right now, in order to have as long as possible to try and make it as competitive as it can be.

The initial phases of the chassis itself – comprising the survival cell and then the gearbox – are on the drawing board for the following year before the current season’s car has hit the track. You can even trace the initial concepts back to the final stages of two seasons’ previous; designers aren’t just thinking months ahead, they’re thinking years.

That’s partly due to the lead time required to manufacture and test certain components, but also the desire to give as much development time as possible to extract the maximum amount of performance from a concept. So the earlier a team can start, the more time it will get to try different ideas and solutions, as each one searches for an edge on the opposition.

Where this race is so complex, is courtesy of F1’s cost cap that limits what teams can spend. And not only are they restricted on numbers of personnel due to cost, there are also limitations on wind tunnel and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) time, where most of the car development is done.

As technical as it might be, it’s humans coming up with the ideas, designing the parts and eventually running the car. And while Verstappen and Perez can see their opponents on track, and are therefore able to react to them in a race scenario, the aerodynamicists and engineers back at the Oracle Red Bull Racing factory in Milton Keynes are working blind compared to their rivals.

And that process happens over a far longer period of time than many realise. In order to have all of the required parts ready in terms of manufacturing time, a chassis would be released to be built between July and September of the previous year. While a title fight might be entering its final stages, the factory is often flat out on work that has nothing to do with the ongoing battle.

The main aerodynamic items – such as the front and rear wing and major bodywork – are signed off around the middle of December, before teams take an enforced Christmas break. These need to be ready for the first car build early in the new year to ensure everything fits together as it should.

Finally, smaller components can be released as late as January for the launch the car, that often comes together in full for the first time for a first on-track run during a filming day in February. This year, staff members from different departments finally got to see how their section fits into the overall picture once the RB20 ran on a cold, wet day at Silverstone.

Only then do the cars get flown to Bahrain for pre-season testing. More than a year’s work to get to the point of a car that will take part in the early rounds, the product of effort from hundreds of people who finally get to find out if their work has led to a car that is competitive enough to defend the drivers’ and constructors’ championships that were so hard-earned over the past few years. 

Work on the car doesn’t stop there, either. Aerodynamic development continues to bring upgrades to the car, usually up to the summer break. Incredibly, those final developments are the only aspects that are worked on in the knowledge of the competitive picture. Everything else is a race against time to advance the car’s performance as much as possible, without knowing what is going to be enough.

It then becomes a positive spiral, where the more time that can be spent on a future car makes it more likely to have an advantage over the opposition, and therefore a further gain can be made the following year. That happened with the RB19 last season, allowing the design team led by Adrian Newey and Pierre Wache even longer to sculpt the eye-catching RB20. A single-seater which, we hope, will once again enable Oracle Red Bull Racing to retain its title.