Don Kennedy on Formula One: Red Bull unfazed by copycats

Mercedes hope to be much closer to the Red Bulls in Canada, than they were in Spain. Photo / Don Kennedy

When Sergio Perez crashed in qualifying for the Monaco Grand Prix, his car was craned off the circuit, high into the air. Photographers working for rival teams were delighted to get images of the floor of the car that every team on the grid is trying to emulate in terms of performance. It wasn’t long before Mercedes confirmed it had a “nice clutch” of photos of the underside of the Red Bull to send to their aerodynamicists to study and possibly replicate.

Paul Monaghan, the chief engineer at Red Bull, admitted “it’s not great” that their rivals had access to the floor images but was quick to downplay the significance of what their rivals had got hold of.

“We don’t put our car up [like that] but it has happened, and we’ll move on,” Monaghan said at the time.

“But there’s a phase lag between people seeing it, getting it onto their car and actually going faster with it. A better description is that an ignorant copy isn’t necessarily going to go faster. It has to integrate. And it’s not just a bit of floor geometry.”

Monaghan’s point is that it took months for their design ideas to end up on the car, and it could be as late as October before any copycat concepts emerge on other cars.

“Our development path is reasonably well laid out in terms of the timings we wish to deploy things if they’re going to make us go faster,” he noted.

“If we change someone else’s development plan, then we probably increase the phase lag by which they can get it to the car. So around Japan time, we’ll see where everybody is. But we’ve got to maintain our discipline and our development path. And it’s our only car that we can change. We can’t influence what those guys do. So, we’ll keep plugging away in our own manner and we’ll try to be quickest.”

Red Bull expects to remain number 1 in Canada despite the rival teams playing copycat. Photo / Don Kennedy

Copycats are nothing new in F1, of course. The revival of the Aston Martin this year has been put down to copying the Red Bull car, to the extent that when Aston Martin driver Fernando Alonso joined Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez on the podium on more than one occasion so far, those in charge at Red Bull made quips about the resemblance.

“If you compare the cars, the Aston Martin is most similar to our Red Bull,” team adviser Helmut Marko said.

“There’s a reason for that. Not only did Fallows change, but also some other employees and they obviously have a good memory.”

Marko was talking about former Red Bull engineer Dan Fallows, defection to Aston Martin along with several others. They wouldn’t have been able to take any blueprints with them of course, hence the Marko reference to them having a good memory.

Christian Horner chimed in with some heavily disguised sarcasm.

“I think it demonstrates to all the teams that it’s possible,” Horner stated. “So, they’ve obviously done a good job over the winter, they say imitation is the biggest form of flattery. It’s good to see the old car going so well.”

It took Aston Martin several months to come up with changes that resembled the Red Bull, so Monaghan’s point that having photos of the floor of its car won’t be of instant value to the other teams.

“Other people will look at our car and try to if they think they’re going to go faster, take influence from it. It’s fine.”

Already since the season began, we have seen Mercedes and Ferrari switch to the same downwash side-pod concept that Red Bull has. Of the two teams, it is Mercedes that seems to have made the biggest leap forward.

Horner and Mercedes boss Toto Wolff, hardly see eye to eye on anything in F1, especially since that controversial end to the 2021 championship, when Wolff accused the former FIA race director, Michal Masi, of favouring Red Bull by not finishing the race under a safety-car, allowing Verstappen to pass Hamilton on the last lap and win his first championship.

At the Monaco GP, Horner lightheartedly suggested, “I think he’s blocked [on my phone]” in reference to Wolff.

“It’s fine. I mean, look there’s healthy competition and it’s good to have rivalry in sport. They did a lot of winning, they’re a great team, and now we’re doing our thing and we’re tending not to look behind and looking forward.

“It’s not really about Toto. It’s about Ferrari, about Aston Martin. And he’s no doubt got his challenges, so I’ll let him focus on those. It’s boring if everybody just loves each other and whatever. You’ve got to have a rivalry and it’s got to fire people up.”

That said, there is clearly no love lost between Horner and Wolff, the latter having claimed earlier in the year in a UK Times interview: “I am living in his head rent-free. The guy is obsessed.”

Of course, Horner is not too worried about the Mercedes challenge, given Verstappen beat Hamilton by 23 seconds in Spain, and Red Bull is ahead of Mercedes by 135 points in the Constructors’ title race.

The 1996 world champion, Damon Hill, and now a Sky sports commentator, is convinced that after the Spanish GP result, where Hamilton and George Russell were second and third, Mercedes has now “leapfrogged the threat from Aston Martin and Ferrari”.

“They’ve actually shown on a circuit where it really pushes the car’s ability to look after its tyres and has good balance and good air performance, it’s shown that it’s got the potential there,” Hill claimed.

“Now, all circuits are different, that’s the great thing about our sport. They’re not all like Barcelona but Barcelona is one of those places where it shows pure performance, in the aero package and ability to get a balance on tyres and so forth.”

“Which is why Max was so dominant, but I think there are encouraging signs there for Mercedes, definitely.”

The problem for Mercedes is the budget cap. The team has basically used up a lot of its budget by bringing relatively major upgrades to Spain in terms of a new floor and front suspension. Mercedes trackside engineering director, Andrew Shovelin, says the new look Mercedes has more “freedom”.

“Probably the new geometry has given us more freedom because the problem we always had before the last race weekend was to get a good front end when cornering was needed and good stability on entry when braking hard and cornering,” he explained.

“This compromise was always something we couldn’t fix. You always end up with a weak rear when entering or a poor front when exiting corners. So, let’s hope that these new suspensions take us in the right direction.”

But Mercedes has spent a significant portion of its budget on the revised car.

“Basically, we made a new suspension and suspension is expensive to make and fit on the car,” Shovelin admitted. “We don’t know how many things we’re going to do. I don’t expect to make any leaps and bounds.”

Horner is well aware that Mercedes will pay some price for its improvements.

“They’ve basically introduced a B version of their car. They must have used a significant part of their development budget in what they did,” he noted.

“I think if I look at the gap at the end of the race it’s very similar to what there was between us in Bahrain.”

This weekend is the Canadian GP in Montreal at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. Verstappen won the race last year by just one second from Carlos Sainz in the Ferrari, with Hamilton third. Ferrari believes that its drivers are suffering due to the pressure of trying to get the best out of an underperforming car, whereas Verstappen has no real pressure at all.

“You don’t have to be a genius to know that Red Bull is very difficult to catch this season, which doesn’t mean Ferrari can’t win,” Sainz said. “It is difficult for Max to be forced into an error with a Red Bull that is so dominant and without pressure.”

Aston Martin says it will bring an upgrade to what is Lance Stroll’s home race, to put itself back in the fight for second place with Mercedes and Ferrari. But for Red Bull, expect it to be another case of that team saying catch us if you can, for the would-be copycats.

Sources: F1.com, Mercedesamgf1.com