Sergio Perez had a huge coming together with the two Haas cars at the 2024 Monaco GP. The crash damaged the RB20 quite badly with only the monocoque surviving due to its sturdity for safety reasons. Now, Helmut Marko has revealed how these damages are going to cause a dent of $2 -3 million in Red Bull’s pockets.
According to @formularacers_ on X (formerly Twitter), Formu1a.uno reported the Austrian advisor’s views on the after-effects of Kevin Magnussen and Perez’s massive crash at Beau Rivage. Marko suggested how this crash will also affect their development plans and budget.
| Red Bull suffered $2-3 million in damage costs from Perez’s crash.
This will hurt development:https://t.co/8o9y9BtuK2
— formularacers (@formularacers_) May 27, 2024
Usually, $2-3 million is the amount for damages any F1 team suffers overall throughout an entire season. However, Perez’s Monaco GP crash has transcended those standards. While the crash wasn’t his fault as per most, Red Bull will have to bear the brunt of the same come what may.
In the budget cap era of F1, where the entire year’s operational budget for each team has an upper limit of $135 million, the Milton Keynes outfit have got a major setback due to this incident. All teams have been looking to bring one or two major upgrade packages due to the cost cap in the past two seasons, rather than bringing new bits to the car every weekend.
Meanwhile, Red Bull did not face the need to bring as many upgrades last season. But, 2024 is a different story. The defending champions have to be on top of their development game with rivals like Ferrari and McLaren closing the gap thick and fast.
Such a financial blow worth $2 million to their overall budget will have a cascading effect on their in-season upgrades later this season. So, Red Bull have to figure out a way to limit the damage to their on-track advantage.
Red Bull have a fight on their hands in 2024
McLaren and Ferrari have unsurprisingly emerged as two major challengers to Red Bull’s dominance. Many had anticipated these two teams to make some good performance gains and they have continued that with their effective upgrades into the season as well.
Ferrari has consistently been the second-best team since the start of the 2024 season, hassling Red Bull several times. Meanwhile, McLaren, following on their 2023 precedent made a massive step up in Miami with their major upgrades.
Now, these gains are pointing towards Red Bull’s comfortable dominance coming to an end. The talks of a potential championship battle, especially in the constructors’ standings are growing, with Ferrari only 24 points behind the Austrian team.
So, from Red Bull’s perspective, every tenth of a second is worth its weight in gold at this moment. They cannot afford to sit easy on the development of the RB20 and need to continue improving on their aggressive design concept.
