F1 News: It has been all downhill for Red Bull since Newey resigned (2nd Update)

Talking about the team’s drastic downfall during the season on the Formula for Success podcast, Adrian Newey’s manager, Eddie Jordan, criticized the team for persisting with upgrades when things are getting worse.

Advising Red Bull to go back to the car they had at the start of the season when Adrian Newey helped design it, and then rebuild from there, Jordan said,

“What was the setup that we had at the beginning? What was the setup we had when we were winning by 15 seconds, and we were cruising? What has changed? Show me the upgrades because sure as heaven these upgrades done by Adrian Newey’s replacements haven’t worked.”

He added, “You’re fooling yourself, you’re trying to believe in a wind tunnel that’s obviously given you miscalculations. Let’s go back to where we were and start from there. Make sure nothing gets changed until we can categorically guarantee that it’s quicker. That’s the way I feel about it. It’s now catastrophic.”

Eddie Jordan feels Christian Horner has a big job to repair Red Bull’s current situation

“Christian Horner has a massive job on his hands because he has to take out the big stick and start cracking it. We all were slagging off Perez but maybe Perez and that car – that’s the speed of the car, and what Max is doing is what Max is able to do. Beyond any doubt he’s the best driver in F1 in my opinion at this moment in time. Therefore, to finish fifth and fourth, or six, whatever it is, it must be killing him at this stage.”

For Red Bull, the Constructors Championship already seems to be long gone at the moment as the gap is down to single digits. There’s also the driver’s championship that is increasingly becoming more and more interesting as Lando Norris continues to cut down the gap to Max Verstappen.

There is no question that if Adrian Newey was still with Red Bull the team’s upgrades starting with Miami would have made the car faster, not slower.

Red Bull will rue forever the day Newey resigned.

Red Bull has lost its way after letter their design genius Adrian Newey leave the team because they did not want to meet his salary demands.

Domenicali asked Red Bull to Slow down

“It just shows that things have moved very quickly,” Red Bull Boss Christian Horner said. “I mean, we were winning races by 20, 25 seconds and Stefano [Domenicali, F1 CEO] was asking us to slow down in the first five races (because fans were switching off the TV).

“It can change very quickly and that means it can change back the other way as well,” Horner added. “We know we’ve got an issue. You can hear that Max didn’t feel that the car was responding to what he wanted. We’ve obviously got to be able to manifest that into a setup that works these tires across all conditions.

“McLaren did that with Lando. We weren’t able to, but we limited the damage by ‘if you can’t win it, finish second’,” he maintained.

Verstappen insisted there is no need to panic yet, and Horner echoed his sentiments, he explained: “Based on [the] performance, if it was like that at the next nine races, yes, it would be very, very difficult.

“But it’s the fourth time this year, only the fourth time, that Max’s points lead had reduced. It’s only Lando’s second win.

“But we know we have to find performance. So we were 78 points, now we’re 70 ahead. We want to make sure that we extend the lead, not see it continuously diminish.

“Obviously they made a step a little while ago and their car here particularly with Lando was very impressive. So, we need to understand where and address our deficit,” the Red Bull boss concluded.

Red Bull has lost its way after letter their design genius Adrian Newey leave the team because they did not want to meet his salary demands.

–by Mark Cipolloni–

As a result, a team like Aston Martin who are willing to meet Newey’s salary demands will reap the rewards.

Red Bull started the year as the dominant car and team, but it has been all downhill right about the same time Newey announced he was leaving.

Following this weekend’s Dutch Grand Prix, Max Verstappen’s 200th race, the championship leading driver has said that his car just doesn’t have the balance it once did.

“It wasn’t there in the first few races, but something in the car has made it more difficult to drive,” Verstappen said after finishing 22 seconds behind Norris in second for his first-ever home race defeat at Zandvoort.

“It’s very hard to pinpoint where that is coming from at the moment. And that is then hurting, of course, our one-lap performance, but also our long-run.

“The whole weekend has been the same limitations. I had pretty much the same balance from FP1 all the way to the race, so it’s just very hard to solve at the moment.

“It just seems like we are too slow, but also quite bad on degradation at the moment. That’s a bit weird because I think the last few years normally we’ve been quite good on that.

“So, something has been going wrong lately with the car that we need to understand and we need to quickly try to improve. It’s just not a connected balance, front or rear.”

Whatever direction the team has gone in with its design hasn’t translated to as much pace, and has actually come with a chassis balance and tire degradation disadvantage.

The most innocuous explanation for this complete pace role reversal is Newey’s departure.  The engineers remaining at Red Bull, led by Pierre Wache, simply do not have the design knowledge and experience that Newey has. They lost their leader and all their upgrades since then make the car worse.

Another explanation is this rumor: F1 News: FIA denies Red Bull was using now-banned innovation

There is speculation in the paddock, which Red Bull denies, that the energy drinks company’s F1 team was running an illegal “T valve” which would effectively employ a ball bearing in the braking system to cut off some percentage of braking force to the outside tire in a high-G corner.

This was first brought up by F1 journalist Peter Windsor on Twitter, where he posted “Looks as though RBR might have been running a clever rear cross-brake inertia valve before they were obliged to remove it before Miami. This could explain Max’s RR brake drama in Melbourne and his turn-in grief since China.”

A Red Bull mechanic replied “Yea… this is bullshit…. Unsurprisingly”