Red Bull Racing has introduced a four-part upgrade package for the 2025 Mexico City Grand Prix, including updates to the floor body, edge wing, front corner, and engine cover.
The upgrade is designed to provide Red Bull’s RB21 with added efficiency and reliability in Mexico City’s low-altitude challenge, ideally presenting Max Verstappen with yet another push toward securing his fifth consecutive championship.
Red Bull Racing introduce Mexico upgrades in Max Verstappen title challenge
With just 40 points separating third-placed Max Verstappen from 2025 championship leader Oscar Piastri, the reigning WDC is looking for every advantage he can find heading into the final five grands prix of the year, and Red Bull Racing has brought four new upgrades in pursuit of that goal.
The team has tweaked the front corner, engine cover, floor body, and edge wing in an effort to improve local load and reliability as the F1 circus heads to its highest altitude of the season and therefore must cope with thinner air prompting issues with cooling.
Ferrari, Alpine, Racing Bulls, Williams, and Sauber have all brought upgrades designed to target cooling as well, but no team brought as many updates as Red Bull.
Regarding the front corner, Red Bull stated to the FIA that the team has implemented an enlarged front brake inlet and outlet ducting, writing, “Given the rigours of brake cooling in the reduced atmospheric pressure of Mexico city [sic], larger inlet and exit caps have been prepared for this race to simply recover air mass flow.”
The engine cover has undergone a redistribution of top-body exit areas, with the team stating, “In work carried out for the previous cooling revision, more benefit was found from redistributing the exit air and given scope to introduce via an update to existing tooling, this can be deployed in Mexico.
“In addition, a wider louvre exit panel is available to recover mass flow in the ambient conditions encountered.”
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The two previous upgrades were both stated as intending to address reliability, while the following two — tweaks to the floor body and edge wing — aim to target local load.
The floor body has undergone “subtle revisions to the upper surface at the radiator duct inlet and to the sidepod split line.” The team explained that it has utilised a previous specification of floor with a new “upper surface rearwards of the outer floor fence plus sidepod split line,” with “the latter to accommodate the sidepod revision.” This will aid with cooling.
Finally, there’s been a small tweak to the leading edge of the floor, with the team writing in its official submission, “To draw benefit from the lowered upper floor surface and made from the previous edge wing specification, a revised leading edge region extracts a little more load whilst maintaining flow stability.”
Paul Monaghan, chief engineer at Red Bull Racing, spoke to media including PlanetF1.com in order to further define the goals of the updates.
The team has implemented louvres that look different in shape to the remainder of the field; Monaghan explained that “we are allowed to be different, so we chose to be.
“It depends how you want to do with the top-body exist; what you take out down by the wishbones. If you go and look at a certain orange guy, you’ll see some exits down by the wishbones.
“Us, we chose to bring out a combination via the louvres and via the central exit, and what you choose to distribute, you choose to distribute.
“A different way to look at it is, how much air do you need to push through the side pods to get the cooling? Once you’ve got that, then you’ve got an indication of your exit area.
“Most cars are exit-limited, not inlet-limited. So you’re opening up the exit first, and how they choose to do it is down to their top body shape and how they spill it onto the rear wing.”
Most teams have turned their attention to developing their 2026 cars, considering the transformative regulatory set that will be introduced for that season. Typically, any focus on 2025 will therefore cost the team come 2026; but Monaghan denied that the current upgrades have required any significant transfers of manpower thanks to the utilisation of a previous spec floor.
“We have taken the choice, and it’s a make-from, so it’s a previous floor that we’ve managed to recycle,” Monaghan explained.
“It was sufficiently modular to get it here. The redistribution of cooling exits was found when we went through the last iteration of top-body, and we thought, ‘Oh, we’ve missed that one; we can get it in here, though.’
“Some magical work in Milton Keynes, and it’s here.”
Since the introduction of a new floor in Monza, Red Bull Racing has gone from strength to strength in terms of performance, with Max Verstappen winning three of the four races that have followed.
According to Monaghan, that upgrade certainly helped, but the team’s early identification of its issues with balance enabled it to begin solving its problems in an incremental way, thereby slowly building the momentum of performance.
Verstappen will have an abbreviated amount of time to acquaint himself with these upgrades; he sat out Free Practice 1 in order to satisfy one of his two required rookie practice sessions per season. Red Bull junior Arvid Lindblad took his place, while the reigning champion looked on from the pit wall.
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