Formula 1 News: Does VCARB 01 car offer clues for RB20?

Red Bull will become the final team to launch their 2024 F1 car next week, with the RB20 due to be unveiled on Thursday of this week.

IndyCar driver and former Haas F1 driver Romain Grosjean thinks that the Visa Cash App RB VCARB 01 F1 car, developed by Red Bull’s sister team has provided a “good idea” of what the new Red Bull RB20 will look like.

Grosjean, who spent five seasons with Haas between 2016 and 2020, believes the deeper technical partnership is already evident in the design of the new VCARB 01 – and believes the car offers clear pointers to the potential design of the RB20.

Appearing via his YouTube channel, Grosjean said of the VISA Cash App RB team: “That’s a long name, but it’s also a pretty cool livery with a lot of painting.

“I really like that. I think we’ve seen a lot of cars using carbon and definitely on that one we see the colour.

“Faenza has always been developing and designing their own car for quite a long time, but I think right now they are going to be closer to a Red Bull from last year.

“If you actually compare between the Red Bull from 2023 and the [RB] from 2024, there’s a lot of common features and I think it totally makes sense for the Faenza team to use what the big-brother Red Bull team has been doing over the last few years.

“They’ve been the ‘developing’ car and it’s a very common sponsor, a very common team owner, so for me it 100 per cent makes sense that they’re going to use as much as they can from what the Milton Keynes-based team is doing.

“If we look at the front wing, there’s some similarities; if we look at the sidepods, there’s a lot of similarities; if we look at the back end of the car, there’s a lot of similarities; if we look at the rear wing, same thing.

“They have used a lot of inspiration from Red Bull and they can do that because they use the same gearbox, they use the same engine – so they have the same cooling requirements – and obviously that’s something that they did well.

“If we compare the car from 2023 and 2024, we can see that the front wing design has been changed slightly, even though it has some similarities.

“The nose has stayed similar. They went from pushrod to pullrod [suspension] – again, that’s a Red Bull feature – [and] the sidepod entry has been really redesigned completely, the rear wing as well.

“From the side, we can really see that very specific sidepod design from Red Bull with the front of the sidepod super high, very tiny entry and then trying to put a lot of air underneath it, and at the back trying to have the big slides that come down to the rear diffuser.

“It is very much an inspiration from the Red Bull from last year, but again I think that’s the right thing to do.

“It was the fastest car on track, they are using a lot of similar components – so why not do it when you can do it?

“I think that gives us a good idea of maybe what the Red Bull RB20 could be this year.

“Some of the features are slightly different, slightly more extreme, but I think Daniel Ricciardo and Yuki Tsunoda should have a decent car for the year.”