Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko has revealed the current status of the team's 2025 F1 challenger, which it hopes will take Max Verstappen to a fifth consecutive drivers' title.
This year's RB20 was a troublesome car, which had looked unstoppable after Verstappen won seven of the opening 10 races.
However, it became a car the reigning world champion was clearly unhappy with, resulting in a title fight against McLaren's Lando Norris.
The RB20 only worked in a very specific working window come the end of the 2024 season, whilst McLaren's MCL38 seemed to work everywhere.
According to Marko, the Milton Keynes-based team has addressed this, to ensure the new car works more consistently.
"I would say that the basic concept is ready," Marko told Sport1.de. "The car is de facto finished and it is now going into final production. At that point you see how much weight can be saved.
"The task for the engineers was to build a car that has a wider working window. One that is not so critically on the limit that it is very, very difficult for the drivers to control the car.
"That means better predictability and, if possible, as McLaren has shown, that these performances are delivered on all tracks, not just on specific tracks."
A key weakness of the RB20 was its inability to ride kerbs, with Verstappen having referred to the car as a "kangaroo" in Monaco when trying to go over them.
This issue held the Dutchman back; however, Red Bull believe the problem has been rectified.
"And one of our big weaknesses was not being able to drive completely over the kerbs," added Marko. "There was that statement by Max that the car jumps like a kangaroo, and on certain tracks that cost us a lot of time.
"So we think these weaknesses have been fixed, but we will only really see that during the test in Bahrain."
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Robson Coimbra
I believe in Red Bull's technical ability, they have always been class A in engineering, Horner has always given a lot of importance to the technical part of the team, they have more than 1000 people working on F1 projects and they are all of a high level, the loss of one or two elements does not change the whole.