Red Bull label Adrian Newey’s departure as “big loss”

Red Bull’s chief engineer Paul Monaghan insists that Adrian Newey’s departure from the Milton Keynes-based team will be a big loss as the star designer alawys knew how to solve technical issues.

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 they 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.

Expanding on Red Bull’s current dip in performance, chief engineer Paul Monaghan confessed that the reigning world champion team is now finding itself under bigger pressure than in previous seasons.

“If you consider our lap time as a yardstick, it is a competitive machine. And we had a good start to the season, which was nice. But of course, we are now a little more under pressure.

“In terms of strengths and weaknesses, I think I was asked last year, 'What makes it so valid?' It has the same problems as the other cars. They may only be smaller and we can get a little more time on the lap per corner.

“They all have the same characteristics of input behavior, the behavior through the apex of the curve and the question of output stability. Unless we're allowed to get into the garages, debriefings and data of other teams, then it's pretty hard to judge.”

Despite many believing that Red Bull start to reach the peak of its car, Monaghan thinks that there is still potential to be found in the RB20.

“Applying an element of subjective evaluation, I would say that our car still has the intrinsic strengths of last year... The elements we focused on when we decided to make this generation of cars are still there and it seems that they are serving us well.

“But are we getting to some sort of peak of performance with these rules? I don't know. There are some brilliantly smart people in Milton Keynes who will find ways to redesign the parts and make them a little better, and we'll see how we move forward in the coming months and the next year.”

Adrian Newey announced his shock departure from the reigning world champion team Red Bull at the start of May. The star engineer, who has designed championship-winning cars for three outfits, continued to attend races, but he ended his active involvement in the team after finalizing and launching Red Bull's hypercar, the RB17 at Goodwood.

Expanding on the loss of Newey, Monaghan noted: “For me personally it's a big loss, because I really appreciated our collaboration. I've always liked his way of drawing as well. He just wanted to make the car better possible.

“And wherever the ideas came from, he always knew how to solve the problems. So, from a personal point of view, I think it's a little sad.”