Red Bull Content Pool
F1 News
Who brought the 'secret sauce' from Red Bull to McLaren?
- Corwin Kunst
McLaren are catching up to Red Bull Racing in the constructors' championship week by week and that worries the latter racing team. The MCL38 is the most complete F1 car of the moment it seems. The Woking-based team have turned a big deficit into a lead in a fairly short time. How can that be? Possibly thanks to the arrival of Rob Marshall.
Marshall is Red Bull's former chief engineer. Last year, he left the reigning world champion after eighteen years of service. In all those seasons, he worked closely with top designer Adrian Newey. Did Marshall bring some secrets from his old employer to McLaren? Otmar Szafnauer does not rule it out in the podcast James Allen on F1.
"It’s definitely possible for one person to come in and say: ‘The secret sauce at Red Bull was this, you should be looking in this direction.' That's definitely possible," said the former team principal of Aston Martin and Alpine, among others. "When you hear things like the aero performance is unlocked through some mechanical design elements of the car – and you know what those are and how those mechanical design elements actually unlock the performance – you can point that team in that direction to start looking here."
He continued: "Absolutely one person can make that difference, especially when you have a massive rule change like we’ve had. We’re now into ground-effect cars where we weren’t before and if there was some mechanical elements of the car that others didn’t have, then it can happen. I’m not saying that’s what it was, but I do think that there’s performance to be had in that area that isn’t pure aerodynamics, but is an aero enabler."
This article was written in collaboration with Kada Sarkozi
latest news
