Red Bull has brought its biggest upgrade package of the season to the Hungarian Grand Prix as it aimed to regain the upper hand on its rivals. F1Technical's lead journalist Balazs Szabo analyses Red Bull's upgrade patch in 2024.

Red Bull enjoyed a strong start to its 2024 F1 title defence, winning four of the opening five rounds. It looked like that the Milton Keynes-based outfit would dominate the third year of the current era of ground-effect cars until McLaren and Ferrari achieved a sudden lift in performance.

The Scuderia won in Australia and then in Monaco while the British squad took the victory in Miami. Following a successful upgrade in Monaco, Mercedes also started to claw its way back to the sharp end of the field. So impressive was the step the Brackley-headquartered outfit took that it won three of the last four races.

At the last race before the summer break in Belgium, Verstappen started from P11 as he served a ten-place grid penalty for exceeding his power unit allocation. Although he won the Belgian Grand Prix in 2022 and 2023 from lower grid positions, the Dutchman was seemingly unable to fight his way back to the front, and finished down in P5.

Key steps of Red Bull's development push

As the images of Rosario Giuliana reveal, Red Bull have introduced extensive upgrades in four races which means that although the current specification of the RB20 is not a complete departure from the Bahrain version, there are key differences compared to the first configuration.

At Suzuka, Red Bull concentrated on the cooling arrangement of the RB20. The revision saw Red Bull add an extra inlet on the top front corner of the sidepod and a channel from there merging into the sidepod itself.

At the same time the side-mounted cooling exits have been abandoned.

The floor was also updated as part of the Suzuka upgrade package. The team claimed that the modification led to a greater load without disrupting the airflow stability. The floor edges were also altered to accompany the tweaks to the floor body.

As part of circuit-specific changes, Red Bull introduced smaller front brake ducts that reflected the lower braking demands of the Suzuka circuit.

Red Bull brought a new front wing to Imola that sported a longer upper chord in order to generate more load. Moreover, the leading edge of the endplate has also been tweaked with the aim to improve stability in yaw.

Commenting on the changes, Red Bull noted in its submission to the FIA: “In changing the moving flap geometry, the fixed flap elements into the nose box had to be revised as the parts cannot be treated in a modular fashion.”

After Japan, Red Bull introduced another modification to the floor of the RB20. The outer edge wings have been repositioned with the aim to extract more load locally.

Moreover, the Milton Keynes-based outfit brought a circuit-specific change to meet the specific demands of the Autodromo di Enzo e Dino Ferrari. It saw the team bring a reprofiled brake duct exits to improve the flow of air which cools the discs and other components.

For Barcelona, Red Bull brought five different upgrades, with the team having focused on improving the aerodynamics of the RB20 through a better cooling characteristics.

The geometry of sidepod inlets have been completely revised in order to achieve the greatest cooling efficiency. The team wanted to run the least number of exit louvre openings.

On the drawing of Rosario Giuliana, it is clear to recognize the significant change of the engine cover side panels that feature a much more prominent undercut.

After Japan and Imola, the floor was updated again which was necessary because of the new bodywork.

Furthermore, the lower third of the endplate of the rear wing was moved outboards while the span of the lower beam wing was also expanded.

The Hungarian Grand Prix saw Red Bull unleash a comprehensive raft of upgrade, hoping to regain their form from the early stages of the season.

The Austro-British team introduced an upgrade package from which Verstappen expected that it would impact his team’s performance for the remainder of its 2024 campaign.

Asked whether the upgrade were 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.

“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.”

The most visible change was centered around the sidepod configuration of the RB20. The heavily-modified engine cover displayed a departure from the previous assembly, the high-haunched engine cover design the team adopted for 2024.

The new version featured a more conventional design, returning to a more familiar sharp drop-off from the back of the halo fairing. Red Bull stated this was 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 team 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 were minor changes in the front wing profile too, giving a 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 were centred around the lower wishbone forward leg shroud profile with the aim to provide higher pressure downstream.

However, this upgrade package was only raced by Verstappen, who returned to the previous configuration for the subsequent Belgian Grand Prix. The team has revealed that the Budapest-package might return on circuits where aerodynamic efficiency is less important.

When asked about the effectiveness of Red Bull's development push, team principal Christian Horner insisted that his team started off the current era of ground-effect cars in top form which meant that upgrades have not provided such steps that rivals teams have experienced.

“I think we’re a bit more iterative. We’ve bought some pieces here and there and they’ve done what they’ve said on the tin.

“But when you start to get to the top of the curve, you get into a law of diminishing returns in terms of the amount of development that is earning it’s place on the car.

“With the cost cap we have to be very selective about when we introduce those upgrades," concluded Horner.