The Red Bull team swept the 2023 season, with 21 of 22 possible victories, and its initial dominance allowed the team to refrain from making many improvements to the car during the campaign. Instead, they focused most of their resources on 2024, and produced a car that looked quite different despite the successes of its predecessor.
His decision to go for an aggressive evolution for the RB20, rather than playing it safe, paid off, with Max Verstappen winning four of the first five races of the year, and his teammate, Sergio Pérez, also finding more confidence and competitiveness. in the new car. The drastic redesign of the Milton Keynes team also involved many changes in the installation of your Honda power unit.
Speaking exclusively to Motorsport.com, the president of Honda Racing Corporation, Koji Watanabe, said the engine manufacturer was surprised by all the changes that were made. “For this year’s Red Bull car, we were very surprised to see that they had changed the RB20 so much.”
“Last year we won 21 of the 22 races together, but they still changed the concept, it’s incredible,” he explained. “They made many requests to us to adapt our engine to the new RB20 concept. After seeing the RB20 in real life we were left very surprised by all the changes they made.
In addition to adapting the assembly to the new chassis, Honda also continued efforts to make its power unit more reliable, which it explained, gave Red Bull more design freedom to place its cooling solutions: “Of course, we can’t increase the power [con la congelación del motor]but we can adapt the engine to the new machine.
“In addition to that, we can also improve the reliability of the engine. That’s what we did last winter,” he said. “This has given Red Bull more freedom for their design and for their aerodynamic concept. That’s why they have been able to change the position of the oil radiators etc., sometimes last year we ran the risk of damaging the power unit, which in the end did not become a big problem, but we always have to minimize the risk, that is why we have done our best to further improve the reliability of the engine for this year.
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