Former Red Bull chief technical officer Adrian Newey believes “inexperience” may have played a part in the RB20’s troubled development path last year.

After a dominant start to the F1 2024 season, the development of the RB20 saw the reigning World Champions struggle to compete for victories through the middle phase of the season as other teams came on strong.

Adrian Newey’s theory on Red Bull RB20 development issues

With four wins from the first six races, and having been in contention for victory in the other two, the RB20 started life picking up where the all-conquering RB19 had left off.

Max Verstappen settled into a strong early lead in the Drivers’ Championship, while Red Bull enjoyed a dominant advantage in the Constructors’ Championship.

But, after the first quarter of the season, it became evident Red Bull’s lead was being eroded by the pursuing McLaren, Mercedes, and Ferrari teams – to the point where the Milton Keynes-based squad occasionally found itself as the fourth-quickest team.

The development of the RB20 had gone awry, with team boss Christian Horner pointing to how Red Bull was struggling to trust its tools as correlation between the wind tunnel and the real-world performance of the car began to not match up.

This led to an increasingly tenuous position in the championships, particularly as Sergio Perez failed to match the strong performances of Verstappen, with the Hungarian and Italian Grands Prix, in particular, marking the low points of the team’s performance.

Off-track, Red Bull also had the distraction of the departure of Adrian Newey – the team’s long-time chief technical officer – with the British designer opting to depart the squad in May of 2024. This departure coincidentally came on the same weekend Red Bull’s performance started to dip.

But, in the closing stages of the season, Red Bull managed to get the RB20 back on an upward curve. Having taken a step back on development with a revised floor brought to the United States Grand Prix, Verstappen was immediately back in contention for wins and underlined the improvements with victories in Brazil and Qatar.

Newey has taken up a new F1 role at Aston Martin, where he will become managing technical partner and a shareholder in Lawrence Stroll’s team, where he will start work on March 3rd. Unusually, Newey’s work with Red Bull Advanced Technologies on the RB17 project has not yet ended, with no end date yet set for Newey’s involvement to cease.

The famed designer opened up on where he felt things had gone wrong for his former F1 team during 2024, pointing to how issues had begun to make themselves felt towards the end of the dominant 2023 campaign.

“Obviously, part of it was McLaren in particular, and Ferrari developing their cars, and doing a very good job of developing their cars,” he told Germany’s Auto Motor und Sport.

“I think, Red Bull, from what I could see… the 2024 car, and through the very last stages of ’23 as well, I would say, started to become more difficult to drive.

“Of course, that suited Max, and he could handle that, if you like – it didn’t suit him, but he could handle it. Checo [Perez] couldn’t.

“So you also started to see more of a difference in performance between the teammates, Max and Checo.

“That carried into the first part of ’24 but the car was still quick enough to be able to cope with it.”

Newey’s tenure at Red Bull’s F1 team saw him lead the Milton Keynes-based squad’s technical endeavours across the board, including overseeing and guiding the work of senior designers and engineers.

Red Bull’s long-time technical director, Pierre Waché, has been in his role since 2018 while being with the team since 2013 in other senior technical roles.

Ben Waterhouse, head of performance engineering since 2018, previously worked closely with Wache at BMW Sauber in the late 2000s, while Paul Monaghan – the team’s chief engineer – has been with Red Bull since 2005.

Despite these senior figures’ career longevity and their vast experience under Newey’s stewardship, the designer offered a surprise theory as to why the development of the RB20 had gone wrong following his step back.

“It’s something I was starting to become concerned about, but not many other people in the organisation seemed to be very concerned about,” he said.

“From what I can see from the outside, but I don’t know, the guys at Red Bull – this is no criticism, but I think they just perhaps, through lack of experience, kept going in that same direction, and the problem came more and more acute to the point that even Max found it difficult to drive.”

Asked whether finding the right setup can counter the effects of such travails, Newey said, “Setup can mask problems to an extent, but the problem is still there.

“To me, setup is more simply optimising the characteristics of the car and, of course, then, to an extent, driver, but I think that’s over-egged.

“I think it’s mainly to complement the characteristics of the car. And then, of course, some circuit-to-circuit variation depending on the nature of the circuit.”

The main issue, Newey said, was that the RB20 was experiencing the symptoms of coming close to the theoretical limits of the current regulations – the current ground-effect rules are entering their fourth, and final, season before a regulation change for F1 2026.

“A ground effect car, which doesn’t have sealed skirts like the old sliding skirt cars, is always going to be very susceptible to aerodynamic instabilities,” he said.

“Because you now start to generate these very low pressures under the floor, but you have all this leakage coming in from the side.

“That creates some, potentially, quite strong losses and problems as you get closer and closer to the ground.

“But, equally, they’re a good way of creating downforce. So you’re always trying to trade downforce versus consistency through it – it’s a difficult problem.”

With Red Bull finding performance again in the final quarter of the F1 2024 season after taking a critical step back, team boss Christian Horner pointed to the team’s “strength and depth” in its operations following Newey’s departure.

“Of course, it’s sad to see Adrian leave – he’s been instrumental in the role played in the team during his time with us,” he told PlanetF1.com.

“But it was just coincidence that the weekend that he announced his departure was that weekend where we saw a bit of a dip!

“No one individual can have that impact so quickly. I think Adrian would be the first to admit that.

“But I think what I’ve been really pleased with is how the team recovered at the back end of the year – pole position and the race win in Qatar, which would have been unimaginable in late August, early September time.”