organic wrote: ↑08 Jan 2024, 16:24
BMMR61 wrote: ↑08 Jan 2024, 16:03
You talk about the longer development time Rd Bull have for the RB20, could you elaborate on what you believe to be the end of development of the RB19? I had seen August as a date for the RB19, I believe that Singapore was the last round of McLaren's upgrades - mid September. So is a raw figure of say 4 weeks really very significant?
Since the question requires some context about the RB19 development I will offer some of my thoughts
Scope of RB and Mclaren's upgrades were different. Last major upgrade of RB was pre-summer break at Hungary. And even Hungary/Baku weren't sweeping/vast but rather they only made changes to sidepod and floor edge wing in each case. The floor body - a critical component of these cars and surely a rich development vein - was only changed once all season @ barcelona which was just diffuser change. Singapore which came months after Hungary changes was
just a tweak to the floor edge wing geometry to add a bit more camber.
Mclaren OTOH brought essentially two overhauls. Austria and Singapore.
Mwillems recently detailed the extent of the singapore changes
This is number of performance changes made by each team. McLaren at 27 vs RB at 12. It takes all of the declaration documents, removed the "track specific" changes eg rear wing trim, brake duct changes and shows a running total.
Not a precise metric, but neither is the final upgrade date: upgrades can be sitting ready to be brought for months before they are put on the car, especially when you have a dominant car.. For all we know RB could've finalized all of the upgrades we saw to the RB19 before Bahrain. McLaren were in the opposite boat such that they were clearly scrambling to get the Austria update out as soon as possible therefore we can safely assume that the Austria/Singapore packages were going straight from pipeline to production to the track. However McLaren having been ~5th in WCC in July when allocations were decided for the 2nd half of the year and finishing 4th in WCC will still be receiving significantly more WT time than RB so I believe that will undo a significant portion of the headstart
Replying to BMMR61 in addition to your post, Organic.
RB have stated that their focus has already moved to the RB21. How true this is I don't know but Ben Waterhouse, Head of Performance at RB has said they are already beginning to shift the focus progressively towards the RB21 of 2025 (!) and have already begun development of the RB 21 with the RB20 development having started quite early in 2023. The stage they are at now is a stage often reached by May/June in a season.
Quite what the implications are for the the gap between Mclaren and RB we can't know. But you could look at this a few ways. You could be optimistic that their strategy of being able to spend all of '25 developing for the new regs gives us a better shot of a title this or next season as they are spending less time than they could on the 24 and 25 cars. Or you could say they are very happy with the car they have developed and be scared.
But I doubt they would have taken this tack if they didn't find the time they felt they needed to be confident of a championship even if we are close on their heels.
So that's what informs me in my own opinion about where we might be relative to RB next year.
Edit:
It's worth noting that if they have nailed down their development path, discoveries for the 21 will likely be backwards compatible to a degree, as with the MCL38 but possibly to a lesser degree. So they may still develop the 20 even when focused on the 21, or to put it a better way, to a large degree the development of both cars is heavily overlapping.
