Newey explains: 'Red Bull struck opposite direction to Mercedes'

Newey did not consider Mercedes concept

Mercedes caused a stir at the start of the 2022 F1 season when it appeared on the grid with a car without sidepods, whereas sidepods were a very important feature at other teams. It was expected that the German racing staple had found something special, but the concept of the W13 proved unsuccessful. Only in the closing stages of the season did Mercedes manage to win another race with George Russell.

Newey certainly did not find Mercedes' concept uninteresting, but he simply saw more potential in developing the RB18 as it was, both for 2023 and beyond. "Obviously with last year’s car we took an aerodynamic direction with the sidepod and design and the concept of the car, which was almost polar opposite to what Mercedes did," he said to the Beyond the Grid podcast.

"Mercedes showed flashes of competitive last year, they won in Brazil. Then you’re faced with a choice of well, do we start to research Mercedes in case you’ve missed something or do we stick with what we’re doing? Our gut feeling was, let’s stick with what we’re doing," he added.

The fierce battle in which Red Bull and Mercedes were embroiled in 2021 up to and including the last Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi forced both teams to continue developing that year's car for longer. This while rigorous regulation changes were planned for 2022.

RB18 developed in relatively short time

Newey admits that as a result, the RB18 was probably developed in a much shorter time than most, if not all of its rivals. "Because for the first time in many years we were in with a shot for a championship, we decided to put quite a lot of effort into developing that car through the year," the 64-year-old Briton explains.

Mercedes did not start the 2022 season competitively, while Ferrari had made great strides. "Ferrari took the opposite approach. They weren’t in the championship battle in ’21, so they stopped developing the ’21 car very early on and just concentrated on the design of the ’22 car. Mercedes was somewhere in between that," Newey continued.

"We kept developing far longer than either of those teams and theoretically that put us at a disadvantage, but I think what we did manage to do is get the architecture right. When the RB18 first came out in Bahrain last year, Ferrari was certainly as quick, if not quicker, in the early season. We managed to get the fundamentals right and that gave us a good development platform."

Red Bull quickly mastered porpoising

Many F1 teams were severely hampered by porpoising, a phenomenon that occurred because of the ground effect. Red Bull had mastered this problem extremely quickly because of Newey's previous experience with the effect, which also occurred in the 1980s. "We had an amount of bouncing, not as bad as the other teams, but we still had some bouncing which we needed to get on top of. I think we had a reasonable understanding of what we needed to do to do that," sounds modest.

"Come the first upgrade we had in for the Bahrain race, then bouncing was much less of an issue than it was for other teams. That meant that we didn’t have to put a lot of our development energy into fixing bouncing, such as Ferrari and Mercedes did," says Newey.