Christian Horner believes Red Bull’s weight savings with the RB19 car are key to the team’s dominance in the 2023 F1 season.
Red Bull enjoyed the most dominant campaign in F1 history in 2023, winning just one of the 22 races between March and November, with Max Verstappen taking 19 wins to claim a third consecutive world championship.
Verstappen’s 19 wins in 2023 erased Verstappen’s 15 in 2022, achieved with the RB18 design.
Red Bull started the 2022 season with an obese car after the RB18’s progression was compromised by Verstappen’s titanic war in 2021 with Lewis Hamilton, with the team allocating huge resources to the 2021 car.
There were plenty of rumours that the team had prepared a lightweight car for the second part of 2022, but the B-spec chassis never gave the impression that Verstappen comfortably eliminated his opponents.
However, Horner admitted that Red Bull had focused on losing weight for 2023, revealing that the car will be 20kg lighter this season.
He told Motorsport. com: “The important thing is that with the RB19 there were a lot of parts that came from the RB18: the gearbox, a giant percentage of the suspension and part of the chassis. It was a good cut. ” and closed for this year.
“The most important thing was that we were able to fix the weight. We were so late in adopting the new regulations in 2021, because of this championship battle, that the car in 2022 was a bit big.
“I’m so in control to take 20 pounds off the car this year and fix some imperfections.
“But there were a lot of spare parts and some factors won, in Max’s case, 19 races this year and 15 last year, so the mix of the two: 34 races.
“They were everywhere. This is not an express area where the load can be lightened. These were just marginal advances across the board.
19 Powerful Stats From Red Bull’s Ridiculous 2023 F1 Season
F1 2024 access bulk payment with Red Bull wallet is the most affected
“I think that’s probably the fundamental difference between the 2022 car and the 2023 car. “
Asked if the Red Bull car would weigh 20kg in 2022, he said: “We’ve been carrying this deficit for much of the year.
Verstappen has won 44 of the last 66 races since the start of 2021, with 44 being the race number chosen by Mercedes rival Hamilton, who was dethroned by the Red Bull driver in highly debatable cases in Abu Dhabi at the end of this season. . Formation
Read next: F1 2023 boss standings: Toto Wolff, Christian Horner and other qualifiers