In an insightful dialogue, F1’s Pat Symonds and designer Adrian Newey hint at further groundbreaking developments in Formula 1’s evolving car designs.
F1’s technical director, Pat Symonds, stated that Adrian Newey believed there was “much more to come” from the current generation of Formula 1 cars.
Newey and his design team have produced another dominant F1 machine, the RB20, this year’s Red Bull, which is a significant evolution from the RB19.
Yet, the Red Bull designer was one of the most vocal critics of the ground effect F1 regulations introduced in 2022, arguing they were too prescriptive and limited design freedom.
Despite teams facing diminishing returns, Symonds mentioned that after speaking with Red Bull’s technical director, there’s still room for development.
“Yes, I do think so, there can still be significant novelties in design during this third year of the current regulations.”
“It’s an interesting question because, of course, when we started discussing regulations, and you might recall we showcased the car in the United States in 2020, planning to introduce it in 2021 before Covid postponed everything by a year.”
“One of the things we did there was to display images of many different car interpretations, because many people were saying: ‘Oh, well, you’re so prescriptive in the regulations, now there’s no room for development.’ And I knew that wasn’t the case, which is why we did that.”
“I was thrilled when we first saw the cars in 2022. There were many different solutions. But you know, to any engineering problem, there isn’t just one solution.”
“Fortunately, we never get there. We iterate in that direction, and we see this iteration in certain areas, for example, the sidepods playing on downwash becoming the way to go, but when you look at this year’s Red Bull, there are interesting inputs in the sidepods, inputs in the headrest area, lots of things.”
“I can’t say I expected it to exactly go this way. But I’m very pleased to see that there are still changes, and I know, from speaking to Adrian Newey, that it’s not over yet. He admitted that this set of rules was far more interesting than anticipated. According to him, there’s much more to discover and to come with these F1 cars.”
F1 Car Innovation Pat Symonds. F1 Car Innovation Pat Symonds
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