Can anyone in F1 catch Red Bull in 2024?

How to beat a team like Red Bull? That's the question facing Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren and Aston Martin this season, and one that Formula 1 is desperately hoping will be answered in order to inject some excitement back into its championship after two dominant wins from Max Verstappen.

Red Bull won 21 of 22 races in 2023, and in Verstappen's hands the all-conquering RB19 rarely looked threatened. Based on the results of the last two seasons, the current technical regulations, introduced in 2022 and applicable until the end of 2025, appear to belong to Red Bull, just as the previous technical regulations dating back to 2014 belonged to Mercedes and the early 2000s belonged to Ferrari.

There is hope for Red Bull's rivals, however. Although the defending champions have extended their advantage from 2022 to 2023, the rest of the field has started to coalesce behind them, and it is believed that the stable regulations from 2023 to 2024 could allow the forefront of this group to 'wrap Red Bull.

That may sound like wishful thinking given Red Bull moved its target from 2023 to 2024 relatively early in its campaign last season in order to focus on another big milestone this year, but some rival engineers believe the law of returns decreasing could apply to Red Bull. progress. If they're right, the development of this year's RB20 could stall while those behind continue to make big strides.

Speaking at the end of the 2023 season, Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff compared capturing Red Bull in 2024 to the challenge of climbing Mount Everest. Although this evocative language was undoubtedly intended to highlight the difficulties his team faces, the success rate of climbing the world's highest mountain has hovered around 60 percent over the past two decades. Simply put, with good preparation and favorable conditions, it is achievable.

Below, we analyze Red Bull's four closest rivals and each's reasons for optimism ahead of the new season.

Mercedes

Once F1's most dominant team, Mercedes has been toppled since the introduction of new technical regulations in 2022. The rules, designed to encourage exciting racing, place greater emphasis on generating downforce using the air circulating under the car.

The aerodynamic relationship between the car floor and the track surface – which is often measured in tens of millimeters – has proven more volatile than most engineers expected and more difficult than expected to reproduce accurately in the simulations. Mercedes' initial car concept for 2022 promised significant performance at low ride height when it went through the wind tunnel, but as soon as the team attempted to access that downforce on the track, it suffered a uncontrollable aerodynamic instability that caused the car to bounce around at high speed. .

Mercedes was forced to move the car off the ground and direct its development to find more downforce at these higher ride heights – which is much harder to do. Some success in late 2022 led the team to believe that they should continue to focus on finding downforce at higher ride heights, despite the inherent engineering difficulties, and so they continued its existing car concept for another year. The team actually achieved its goals over the winter, but when it showed up for the first test of 2023, it became clear that its rivals – notably Red Bull – had moved the goalposts by finding even more performance and stability at lower ride heights. .

Mercedes quickly realized that it had been too conservative in its design approach and set about modifying the car to run at lower ride heights, including new front suspension geometry and a new floor. during the Monaco Grand Prix. However, he was still limited by some design elements built into the car that could not be changed mid-season and ultimately had to make the car's suspension very stiff to achieve performance at lower ride heights, which exacerbated some of its less desirable handling characteristics.

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Toto Wolff unveils the W15 for the 2024 season

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Knowing how it has found itself in a development impasse over the past two years, Mercedes hopes it can unlock significant performance this season with a redesigned monocoque, new rear suspension and continued developments made at Monaco. and Austin.

Ferrari

By the end of the 2023 season, Ferrari was becoming Red Bull's most consistent rival from race to race. For a team that has spent recent years struggling with everything from the direction of its development to its racing strategy, the second half of the campaign has provided reason for optimism. In these last 11 races, Ferrari has taken six pole positions and has dominated every team on the Red Bull grid.

The pole position statistics also tell the story of Ferrari's struggles in 2023, as only one of those six positions was converted into a victory. The lack of race pace due to the way Ferrari treated its tires was a critical flaw of last year's car, and the start of the season was particularly bad. The team seemed to make a breakthrough at the Italian Grand Prix and on atypical street circuits with smooth track surfaces, such as Singapore and Las Vegas, Ferrari had a car that was either faster or on par with Red Bull .

Drivers complained of rear-end instability in the first half, which required tuning the car with a lot of understeer. This particularly affected Charles Leclerc, who prefers a car with a tendency to oversteer, but after the team fine-tuned the settings following an update at the Japanese Grand Prix, he took three poles in the last five races, proving once again the underlying performance of the car.

Like Mercedes, Ferrari has committed to a different car concept for 2024, but the gains it stands to make are arguably lower than those of its rival. Additionally, as team boss Fred Vasseur enters his second year in charge, one can hope that the changes he initiated at Maranello in 2023 will begin to bear fruit in 2024.

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The relative performances of Mercedes and Ferrari will be all the more interesting this year following Lewis Hamilton's decision to move from Brackley to Maranello in 2025. Whether this will constitute added pressure or added incentive remains to be seen.

McLaren

Having made the biggest breakthrough in season performance of any team in 2023, there is renewed optimism at McLaren. A significant update for last year's Austrian Grand Prix catapulted the team to the front of the grid — particularly on high-speed circuits — while another major upgrade for Singapore helped to round out some of the car's sharper edges and made it a competent challenger in slow-speed corners too.

In January, team principal Andrea Stella said simulation data for this year's car suggests the upward trajectory experienced in 2023 will continue at the same pace in 2024. If so, it will dissipate fears that McLaren may have simply reaped low-hanging fruit in 2024. 2023 before a developing plateau this year.

Additionally, the 2024 car benefited from McLaren's new wind tunnel, which the team began using in September last year. The new facility has long been touted as the last major piece to complete the McLaren puzzle, although it is worth remembering that the significant gains made in 2023 came from the Toyota-owned factory in Cologne, Germany, which the team has been using for several seasons.

Since this time last year, when McLaren knew it had fallen short of its targets over the winter, the team has reshuffled its senior engineering line-up, replacing technical director James Key with a technical committee. Two key members of that committee, Red Bull's Rob Marshall and Ferrari's David Sanchez, only joined in early January, meaning the pool of ideas will likely expand once they become more familiar with their new home.

In the meantime, McLaren appears genuinely confident in its ability to build on the success of 2023 and continue to be a challenger at the front of the grid in 2024.

Aston Martin

Although it was distant, Aston Martin established itself as Red Bull's most serious competitor at the start of the 2023 season. Significant improvements from Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren saw Aston lose ground in the first half , then in the second semester, she almost completely lost track of her development.

The team was forced to go back to basics, turning some race weekends into glorified testing sessions, but as painful as the decline in performance was, Aston Martin emerged with a handful of good results towards the end of the year, including a podium for Fernando Alonso in Brazil.

The team also had to deal with the upheaval of moving to a new factory mid-year, which appeared to create short-term difficulties but should provide serious long-term gains in 2024 and beyond. A new open design office is designed to facilitate the free flow of ideas between engineers, while updated manufacturing capabilities should allow upgrades to reach the car faster than ever.

Ahead of this season, technical director Dan Fallows is confident that the lessons learned during the 2023 campaign have proven useful in the development of the 2024 car, but unlike Mercedes and Ferrari, the underlying concept has remained the same. This could prove beneficial early on as Aston Martin faces a more familiar quantity while Mercedes and Ferrari take the time to understand their new beasts.

For Aston Martin to remain competitive throughout the season, it will be imperative that Lance Stroll ups his game in 2024. He only scored 74 points compared to Alonso's 206 last season, and even though he didn't arguably unlucky on some occasions, the deficit between Aston Martin drivers accounted for the gap to Mercedes and Ferrari in the constructors' championship at the end of the year.

To add some pressure, Alonso, who has been so vital to the team's eight podium finishes in 2023, is out of contract at the end of the year with various options open at other teams.