ANALYSIS: Red Bull reveals season-deciding upgrade package

Ahead of this weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix, Red Bull have unleashed a comprehensive raft of upgrades at the Hungaroring, hoping to regain their form from the early stages of the season.

Reigning world champion team, Red Bull began the year with a dominant RB20, but both McLaren and Mercedes have clawed their way back into contention.

The Milton Keynes-based outfit’s main challenger was Ferrari at the start of the season, but the Italian squad appears to have regressed recently despite winning two races this year.

With Max Verstappen having failed to win a race in the last two rounds, he urged his team to bring upgrades to his RB20.

The Austro-British team has now introduced a new upgrade package from which Verstappen expects that it will impact his team’s performance for the remainder of its 2024 campaign.

“We brought stuff but they were not particularly big, I would say. So this one is a bit bigger to what we have brought already. I think for everyone, yeah, this is an important weekend.”

Asked whether the upgrades are crucial for the title race, the Dutchman stated: “You could say that, I think so. If this is not giving us some good lap time then I don’t know how the rest of the season is going to evolve.

“Also at the same time I don’t know what’s coming from the other teams. We just focus on ourselves. We are bringing quite some things to the car and I hope that will give us quite a bit of lap time.”

For the Hungaroring, Red Bull have come up with a host of upgrades. The most visible one is centred around the side pod configuration of the RB20.

Having pursued the engine cover configuration introduced by Mercedes recently, Red Bull has now brought a brand-new version of it. The heavily-modified engine cover is a departure from the previous assembly, the high-haunched engine cover design the team adopted for 2024.

For this this year, the Milton Keynes-based outfit took inspiration from the Mercedes-style engine cover gulleys the German manufacturer previously raced with.

The new version features a more conventional design, returning to a more familiar sharp drop-off from the back of the halo fairing. Red Bull states this is to achieve "better cooling efficiency for a high ambient temperature and relatively slow circuit with the revised geometry by reducing the load losses in such conditions from the exits.”

The significant changes to the top surface of the engine cover prompted Red Bull to make tweaks to the halo fairings in order “to eliminate mismatches in the local surfaces.”

Furthermore, Red Bull has made changes to the rear brake assembly, introducing a triple-element wing. The Milton Keynes-based hinted that the “changes to the profile of the wrap-around upstream of the intakes have given improvements in brake and caliper cooling intake pressures for better efficiencies.”

There are minor changes in the front wing profile too, giving a claimed greater front end load as “knowledge from the previous wings has allowed” Red Bull “to extract more load from revised profiles without affecting flow stability and protect downstream consequences.”

Further changes are centred around the lower wishbone forward leg shroud profile with the aim to provide higher pressure downstream.

Following the introduction of the upgrades, it has been suggested that Red Bull may switch between the two configurations according to track characteristics and conditions. Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache said that this could be the case.

"It's a possibility. It's what we verify during P1, P2. And based on, as you just mentioned, if the cooling level requirement and track characteristic will push us to change, yes, we will.

"As everything, all the parts on the car we have are trying to be the same as all the other parts we changed between track. We try to make the quickest car.

"We try, I say, it doesn't mean we are achieving. At each track, then it could be a possibility, yes. We don't know yet," said the Frenchman.