Red Bull hardly needs new wind tunnel: 'They are the benchmark'

Red Bull Racing is working on a new wind tunnel, which will only strengthen the team's position. Auto, Motor und Sport Indeed, reports that Mercedes has identified quite a few strengths with its rival.

At Dietrich Mateschitz's request, Red Bull Racing is building a new wind tunnel in Milton Keynes. It has been using an old wind tunnel in Bedford for years and it is starting to cause more and more problems with the new regulations. With F1 teams being limited in the use of CFD and the wind tunnel, a team cannot afford the poor efficiency of old equipment.

Class of Red Bull

Yet the lack of a state-of-the-art wind tunnel does not show in Red Bull Racing's current performance. ''Red Bull is the measure of all things in Formula 1 in CFD,'' according to AMuS at Mercedes. The Austrian team is said to have become so good at using computer data that it hardly needs the wind tunnel anymore.

In addition, Mercedes has discovered another of Red Bull's strengths. Indeed, with state-of-the-art sensors, it is perfectly capable of reading problems on the track and translating them into data in a computer. Thus, the team of Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez was the first to solve porpoising problems in 2022.

While competitors continued to struggle with the car's bounce for a long time, Adrian Newey's team developed a car that could handle well on all circuits. The German medium, therefore reports that the RB19 in 2023 will mainly be an evolution of the dominant RB18. The main question is how much effect the wind tunnel and CFD time restriction is going to have on Red Bull in 2023.