This season Red Bull has relented and designed a low-downforce rear wing specifically for the challenges posed by high-speed circuits.
But whilst we’d already had a taste of how the solution performed when Max Verstappen took victory in the Sprint at Spa, Red Bull also had an extra trick up its sleeve when it came to qualifying at Monza, where Verstappen used it to snatch an unlikely pole from under the noses of the McLaren duo, whilst recording the fastest lap in Formula 1 history.
Red Bull cut it fine as Max Verstappen claims Italian GP pole position
It’s worth noting that this is the first time with this generation of car that Red Bull has opted to design a true low-downforce rear wing option, having simply trimmed the upper flap on its pre-existing, higher-downforce options in the past.
For example, last season, rather than redesigning the mainplane and flap section, as it has this season, Red Bull simply took huge chunks out of the trailing edge of the lowest downforce offering it had at its disposal in an effort to reduce drag (as seen below).
Red Bull RB20 trimmed rear wing
This is the reality of a cost cap and resource restricted formula though, as without those restrictions in place there’s no shadow of a doubt that Red Bull would have designed and manufactured a track specific option, as it has been forced to do this season.
Instead the team had to focus its attention on more critical design solutions and take the relative pain at venues that required less drag – a tactic that was undoubtedly employed due to the scarcity of tracks requiring the lowest of downforce configurations.
Max Verstappen vs Yuki Tsunoda: Red Bull head-to-head scores for F1 2025
👉 F1 2025: Head-to-head qualifying statistics between team-mates
👉 F1 2025: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates
Interestingly, it set Red Bull in good stead this weekend though, as whilst the original configuration of the wing was used by Verstappen and Tsunoda during Friday’s Free Practice sessions, the former’s wing was fettled further as the team trimmed the trailing edge of the upper flap to reduce drag and help boost the car’s straight line speed for qualifying (below).
Red Bull RB21 trimmed low downforce rear wing
The rear wing, which will be helpful at other venues this season, isn’t the only update introduced by the team either with revisions made to the floor, its fences and the edge wing as Red Bull continue to search for performance.
The optimisations that have been made aren’t earth shattering or about completely redesigning the floor.
Rather they are a package of tweaks designed to maximise the performance of the whole floor and take advantage of other changes that the team have made recently.
The team only had one set of these components available for this race though, with the parts installed on Verstappen’s RB21 and Tsunoda left waiting until next time out.
One interesting alteration is at the rear of the edge wing though (above) which sees the inboard support bracket that had previously bridged the corner of the edge wing and floor cutout (inset), moved beneath the floor instead.
Not only altering how the airflow moves around that region but also likely resulting in a different load characteristic for the two surfaces.
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