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Red Bull Racing

Will Red Bull switch to a Mercedes-style zeropod concept?

RacingNews365 technical expert Paolo Filisetti addresses one of the big rumours from F1 pre-season testing.

Verstappen Bahrain
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To news overview © XPBimages

Looking at the Red Bull RB20, this car is seemingly the benchmark for the other cars.

Starting with the concept, it has been made to the extreme with a very complex radiator cooling layout - the radiator placed on the top edge of the sidepod - while we have not just the horizontal inlets but also vertical slits, which feed the intercooler for cooling the turbo and also all the electronics.

It is a very interesting car from this point of view and shows how Adrian Newey and all the other engineers from Milton Keynes decide to develop the previous concept to gain time in comparison to rivals.

The solution on the RB20 can't be integrated easily on another car, so this means all season long it will be impossible for the other rivals to mimic the packaging of this car.

Change of concept?

In another way, we can already see this is a sort of definite design.

Across testing, we had a rumour that in Japan, there will be a huge overhaul of the car that will adopt a zeropod concept.

I am sceptical about that because of the already extreme concept of this car and the huge complexity that the cooling system has already shown.

It is a car that we will follow but I am not sure this means that in four races time we will see Red Bull abandoning this concept. I think this concept has huge potential and can keep rivals at a certain distance for a while.

F1 2024 pre-season testing RN365 News dossier

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