2025 Oracle Red Bull Racing F1 Team

[Emag]

Mclaren wouldn’t be saying it won’t change anything if it was going to change anything because if they are nowhere come Spain, they lose all credibility. Red Bulls’s opinion doesn’t really matter because they don’t know how the Mclaren car works. It was interesting that Leclerc, Russell, and Hamilton also made some comments about Spain though suggesting to expect a change in the pecking order …but it may be a case of competitors being wishful. They had also hoped that several TDs would hobble Red Bull in the past.

But also, Mclaren was very cagey about mini-drs last year so they are very sensitive about PR. They claimed that it was the goodness of their own hearts that made them decided to remove the mini-drs.

The change is only reducing the flexibility by 5mm at the specified load. I would guess it’s worth 1 tenth (average) at most. Mclaren will have to make more compromises because the car will be either draggier with the same wing load or they lose some front downforce in order to maintain straight line speed.

I find this interesting too, we know that Mercedes and Ferrari ran a flexi front wing in 2024, so how will the new test in Spain not affect them too if at all?

Maybe they understand the significance of it because they have taken advantage of it. Mercedes has had their serpent wing since 2023 I feel. Ferrari brought their own in COTA last year. However they could feel their implementation is a cheap imitation of the Mclaren wing so when the playing field is leveled they hope to gain some ground.

I tend to think there’s something here (small though). It’s one thing if it’s just Red Bull (you could call it sour grapes) but Ferrari and Mercedes have their eye on it too. Usually when drivers talk anything technical, they are just parroting what they have heard in their engineering briefings.

Actually Mercedes probably had the most flexible front wing in 2022 already, whereas McLaren had a front wing which flexed at least as much as their 2024 front wing in early 2023 at the latest.

…

And sure enough, Mercedes was already utilizing the flexing front wings to quite an extreme degree I would say, since back in 2022 :

https://i.imgur.com/lmwyxVy.png

It was very hard to find nose cam footage of this car for some reason, but I was certain that they must have had it back then just judging by how much angle there was on that front wing back in 2022 and I wanted to confirm those suspicions. Finally after some browsing, I came across this video.

…

The only constant is RedBull having the most rigid wings out of them all throughout this entire ground effect era.