Red Bull with the RB20 in Bahrain: waiting for another surprise on the car?
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Almost every year Red Bull Racing did it: the Austrian team presented a car with the livery for the upcoming season, but it was not actually the car with which the test and the first Grand Prix would be driven. Rather, the Austrians kept the competition in the dark about the contrived, technical gadgets.
A week ago in Milton Keynes, everything was different. The team of Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez presented an RB20 that really is the RB20, Christian Horner revealed to, among others GPblog: "The car that you see there is the car that will be in Bahrain. There might be some subtle changes to it. It's unusual for us to unveil a real car but because it's so close to the season, we felt that it was it was right to do so."
Lots of RB19s on the F1 grid in 2024
If you take a look at the cars as presented by the other nine F1 teams, you will notice some similarities to last season's Red Bull car. "When RB19 was the most successful car in the history of the sport it's obviously had a design influence on quite a few of our competitors. Of course you can see a theme in some of those cars that have been influenced by the 19. 20 is a step change. It’s different and as you can see it's not a conservative evolution."
At least in terms of sidepods, the RB20 itself looks something like last season's Mercedes. Horner admitted that his team is also looking at the other cars. "I don't think you can ever be blinkered. There's always interesting solutions that other teams come up with creatively. That's part of the charm of Formula One is that everybody looks at the regulations and they imply their best interpretations of those rules."