Max Verstappen romped to his third consecutive F1 title last year with the RB19 – winning a whopping 19 out of 22 Grands Prix. This year, with an all-new RB20, the Dutchman has started the season where he left off last year, as he won the first two races of the 2024 season, by a bigger margin than he had last year. However, when asked to explain the jump Adrian Newey had orchestrated from the RB19 to the RB20 in “football terms”, the 26-year-old hilariously downplayed it as a squad upgrade.
While streaming a session of EA FC24 on Twitch with his Team Redline mates, Verstappen was quoted (on X (formerly Twitter)) as saying, “RB19 and 20, in football terms? Well, you’ve got a squad right? So, [RB19] was last year’s squad, and now you’ve got this year’s squad! You just try to upgrade it a bit, you know?”
After seeing the utter domination that Red Bull had unleashed on their rivals last year, many experts believed that the RB20 would only be an evolution of the concepts of the RB19 that propelled the team to 21 race wins. But when the Austrian outfit unveiled the RB20, earlier last month, the true extent of the work Newey had done to revolutionize the concept of the car came to light.
Newey’s gamble with the Mercedes-esque zero-pod design seems to have paid off, though. Max Verstappen won the Bahrain Grand Prix with a 20+ second advantage and the fastest lap. In Jeddah last weekend, the #1 driver made it two in a row this year with the team scoring 87 points out of a maximum of 88 points on offer so far (Charles Leclerc took 1 point away from Verstappen for the fastest lap at the 2024 Saudi Arabian GP).
How Red Bull revolutionized Mercedes’ failed F1 concept
Even during the launch event of the RB20, and the car’s first shakedown at Silverstone, the Bulls used clever lighting tactics and photography angles to hide the true extent of the changes to the sidepods of the car.
At first glance, it seemed as though Newey had taken the gamble of replicating the failed zero-pod design that Mercedes had tried to implement with the W13 and an earlier spec of the W14. However, as the RB20 made its appearance at the pre-season test in Bahrain, these rumors turned out to be only partially true.
In reality, the British design genius had taken inspiration from the Silver Arrows’ concept but had developed a completely new design for the car. Rather than one large conventional horizontal inlet, the RB20 sported two slim inlets, one horizontal and one vertical.
But what really caught the eyes of the fans, the pundits, and the media alike was a third air inlet that was on either side of the body-work, just above the driver’s heads on the roll-hoop.
