Red Bull reveals RB14 with new livery
Aston Martin Red Bull Racing-Tag Heuer has revealed the first pictures of its RB14. The car is set to make a shakedown at Silverstone today as well, before being shipped off to Barcelona for the start of winter testing next week.
Today Daniel Ricciardo is taking the all-new Aston Martin Red Bull Racing-TAG Heuer RB14 for a spin at Silverstone Circuit as we conduct a pre-season filming day.
The team repeated in its release statement that it has disrupted its usual systems and processes in order to launch their new challenger earlier than ever before. That is reflected in the RB14 livery, a special edition. It remains to be seen if the livery will remain throughout the season, or is just a testing livery.
Technically, the Red Bull teams seems to not have copied a whole lot from Ferrari, contrart to the Haas VF-18 and the Williams FW41 that were launched last week. Instead, the team still has traditional sidepod inlets, rather than the wide and narrow ones as seen on last year's Ferrari. The sidepod shapes are also extremely alike last year's Red Bull RB13, but as the team have moved up their release schedule, it is expected that they still have a lot of new components in their bag to be introduced during the next two weeks of winter testing.
The same is valid for the front, where the RB14 features a (nearly) identical nose cone to the RB13, just like the partnered front wing which is a specification of last year.
For the first time though, a team revealed some fairings around the halo. Haas and Williams showed only the core halo, but Red Bull's RB14 already has some edge fairings on the trailing edge of the device to reduce the drag and vortices coming off of the round structure. The mirror wings were similarly adapted, although it seems that in Red Bull's case, it has less to do with the actual halo, and more about the aerodynamic interaction with the barge boards and sidepod fairing.
This barge board system is interesting as well, with Red Bull seeming dumping Ferrari's outboard panel while going for a Mercedes-style vertically split outboard barge board, along with a fairly high barge board attached closely to the car's chassis, much alike what was present on the RB13.
As ever, teams tend to release as little details as possible, so testing at Barcelona will reveal more.
RBR later revealed a clip of the car heading out for its first run at Silverstone, steered by Daniel Ricciardo.
