Will Red Bull improve in 2024? Monaghan 'does not know'

For Red Bull Racing, the 2024 season has not played out how they would have liked, and how people expected. Many believed that the Austrian team would take control of the 2024 season as they did in 2022 and 2023, coasting to victory in the Constructors' Championship and dominating with Max Verstappen in the Drivers' Championship. However, as we enter the second half of 2024, it has been anything but.

Max Verstappen still has an 84-point lead over Lando Norris in the drivers' standings, along with seven race wins to his name. But in the last few races, his RB20 has not been the fastest on the grid, quite a change from the previous seasons.

McLaren have been the most consistent and have shown superb pace at every race since Norris' win at the Miami Grand Prix. Ferrari sits second in the constructors' standings and hopes to close the gap to Red Bull, despite struggling with recent upgrades, and the resurgence of Mercedes, who have won the last two Grand Prix, has shown that Red Bull are slipping behind, not finding any upgrades and improvements in their pace and consistency.

Can Red Bull improve? "I don't know"

The Austrian team will be hoping that over the summer break, they can find some improvements and move them back up the grid, but at the moment, they are coming under pressure, especially from the improving McLaren and Mercedes. Red Bull's Chief Engineer Paul Monaghan acknowledges this.

"If you consider our lap time to be the currency, it's a competitive car. And we had a good start to the season, which was nice. But clearly, we're coming under a bit more pressure now," said Monaghan, speaking on the F1 Beyond The Grid Podcast.

"In terms of its strengths and weaknesses, I think I was asked last year, 'What makes it so good?' It has all the same problems as other cars. They may just be lesser in magnitude, and we're able to extract a little bit more lap time per corner. They all have the same characteristics of the entry behaviour, the behaviour through the apex of the corner, and the exit stability question. Unless we were sort of allowed to go into other people's garages, debriefs, and data, then it's quite hard to judge."

It was a record-breaking year in 2023 for Red Bull and Monaghan, with Verstappen romping to victory with 575 points and winning a record 19 races out of 22 in the season. The dominance from last year has well and truly gone for the Austrian team, but the 56-year-old engineer believes there are still a lot of comparables to be drawn from the RB19 and RB20.

"You apply an element of subjective assessment, and I'd say our car's still got its inherent strengths from last year. The items we focused on when we set out to do this generation of car are still there, and it appears to be serving us well.

"But are we coming to the sort of asymptote of the rules? I don't know. There are some brilliantly clever people in Milton Keynes who will find ways of redesigning parts and making it a little bit better, and we'll see how far we push round over the coming months and into next year," Monaghan concluded.