Impressive pace from RBR with seemingly small, but apparently winning amount of updates.
As Steven writes on the development blog,
Red Bull manages to retain consistency of performance under different setups.
My analysis on the situation:
- Not touching the profile of the front wing simply means you are OK with its L/D ratio, and you are confident enough to make only modifications at the back, which at the same time do not alter the car's handling as a whole.
- The downforce generated by the rear wing accounts for about 35-45% of the total car's values. Sacrificing some of it means you are able to extract about the same numbers from the underside, which does include both diffuser and floor's leading edge.
- Reducing the rear wing profile towards what is obviously less-downforce wing without changing the diffuser itself means that you have got plenty of downforce from that relatively drag-free device anyway.
- At the same time, a higher and slimmer nose tip has been introduced, without the pelican bulge. This, in theory, should mean front airflow less manageable, but more as a quantity. This air reaches the bardgeboards and the leading edge of the floor.
This is an important place for downforce generation, as it is ahead of the car's Center of Gravity, but close to the Center of Pressure. The leading edge of the floor will be generating vortex formations that will then spin down underneath the floor, along the edge of the reference plane. This reduces the total pressure under the floor and gives you downforce.
- Back to the rear wing, one more evidence that the diffuser-extracted downforce is quite simply excellent with RBR is the known fact that the rear wing works in conjunction with the diffuser - it 'feeds' him. The reduced downforce from the rear wing means again that RBR are lavishly happy with the DF generated by the diffuser.
- The consistency of the setup is largely outlined by the fact that the center of pressure is highly changed from both diffuser and leading edge downforce generation, which does not reflect on the overall car's handling characteristics, as it seems. Vettel was enormously happy with the car, as it was evident from his first radio message after the win.
Based on all these and the fact that the rest of the teams are flip-flopping in setup configs, we can definitely count on RBR for 4-th title in a row. Achieving such consistency and development rate after the middle of the season is a serious query to the title.