Christian Horner, Red Bull Formula 1 team principal, claims the weight reduction of 20kg for its “cut and shut” RB19 car helped the team dominate season 2023.
The Milton Keynes based team exerted itself on a scale of its own while winning 21 out of 22 races. The unchallenged dominance kept it at top throughout the season resulting in both titles, constructors and drivers.
Max Verstappen aced 19 out of 22 races and named the championship title to his name. The team’s rival worked hard to understand the dominating factor of RB, while the team associated it to the weight purging.
Horner revealed the most dominating factor that helped RB to keep itself ahead of rest of the pack. He claims that RB19 carried most of RB18 characteristics, while cutting the weight.
Horner explained the reason. He said: “What you have to remember is that with the RB19, there were a large number of components that came from the RB18: gearbox, a large percentage of the suspension, and half of the chassis. It was effectively a cut-and-shut for this year.
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“The most significant thing that we were able to address was the weight. We were so late going on to the new regs in 2021, because of that championship battle [the previous year] that the car in 2022 was a bit on the chunky side.
“So, we managed to get 20 kilos out of the car coming into this year. And tidy up some of the imperfections.
“But there were a great many carryover parts and some of the components have actually won, in Max’s case, 19 races this year and 15 last year, so the combination of the two: 34 races.”
Horner associated the success factor primarily to the weight reduction. Nonetheless, he claimed improvements in all areas while moving from RB18 to RB19.
He said: “It was a little bit everywhere. It was not one specific area that you could take the weight off. It was just marginal gains in all areas.
“I think that was probably the fundamental difference between the 2022 car and the 2023 car.”
