Christian Horner says that Red Bull is still working on finding a solution to fix their ‘flappy rear wing’ issue.
Red Bull’s rear wing has been a cause for concern for the team for quite a few weeks now. During last week’s Qatar GP, TV footage showed how the rear wing in Max Verstappen’s car was behaving unusually. The top element of the rear wing was ‘flapping’ when Verstappen opened his DRS.
The Milton-Keynes team was running a medium downforce set up in Lusail. This hampered their performance during the practice sessions, which forced the team to resort to a high-downforce setup for Qualifying on Saturday. They performed better, but the car was still behind Mercedes in terms of pace.
Red Bull’s rear wing is literally samba dancing but Horner can’t stop talking about the Mercedes wing 😓 pic.twitter.com/3kGUlGzao4
— CJ !i (@CJ_Unparalleled) November 19, 2021
There are just two races left in 2021. F1 travels to Saudi Arabia in a week, followed by the season finale in Abu Dhabi. Both of these tracks are expected to favour low/medium downforce setups.
If Red Bull cannot figure out how to solve their issues by then, Mercedes will have a massive advantage in those rounds.
Solving the rear wing issue should be straightforward, says the Red Bull chief
Team principal Christian Horner admitted that they wanted to use a ‘higher downforce setup’ in Qatar anyway. But, they are also aware that they need to develop a solution that will solve their rear wing issue before racing in Jeddah.
“That was our preferred wing and it was the setup direction we wanted to go in,” said Horner.
“If those other wings are required in either Jeddah or Abu Dhabi, obviously we’ll need to have fixes in place to straighten them up. And the DRS mechanism.”
• Red Bull changed to a Monaco kind of rear wing (in Qatar) at last minute before quali (never tested it, logically the balance was off) because the other one with less DF had the DRS/flap issue. For some reason they can‘t seem to fix the issue.#F1 #AMuS
— tami. (@Vetteleclerc) November 23, 2021
Red Bull won’t be allowed to make any changes to their rear wing at this stage of the season. However, team boss Horner thinks that the fixing shouldn’t be much of a problem.
“I think from a reliability point of view it should be relatively straightforward to sort out those actuators,” he said. “We’ve been using them for many years now, so it’s not a new technology.”
Red Bull are currently 4 points behind in the Constructor’s standings. Meanwhile, their star driver Max Verstappen holds an 8 point advantage over Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton in the Driver’s standings.
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