Red Bull held a behind-closed-doors shakedown at Silverstone with the RB18, a test that was kept secret after the much-criticized unveiling on February 9, when the Austrian team only showed off its new livery on an FOM show car.
The team that won the drivers’ championship last year has been adept at avoiding leaks of images that clearly show the concepts of its car, although some low-resolution shots that have appeared on social networks give very precise indications.
Adrian Newey has configured his ground effect car with slanted bellies, following the concept that exaggerated the Mercedes W13 that we discovered last Friday.
Apparently, the Milton Keynes team would have a design similar to the AlphaTauri AT03, which is normal considering that certain solutions were born from Red Bull Technology and are available to both teams.
Waiting to see the RB18 up close in pre-season testing in Barcelona, which starts on February 23, we have been able to glimpse that the car could have a pull-rod suspension at the front, which would be in line with the choices made by James Key in the new McLaren MCL36.
Ultimately, Red Bull would move away from the Mercedes and Ferrari concept, which have remained faithful to a much more traditional push-rod scheme. Technical director Pierre Waché will have considered the advantages of bringing the suspension closer to the floor of the bodywork and thus benefit from a lower center of gravity.
However, in the RB18 it is not only its pull-rod design that attracts attention, but also the arrangement of the multi-link arms that takes to the extreme an idea introduced in the RB16, later abandoned by the RB16B world champion car and adopted by the AlphaTauri. AT02.
If in 2020 there was only the misalignment of a triangle with two separate fixings of the arms to the support, in the RB18 there would also be a rear element of the “no triangle” that seems to get into the lower part of the body, giving way to a new concept directed not so much at the mechanical function as at the aerodynamics, leaving some doubts about the rigidity of the system.
The diagonal arm, together with the brace, would become an efficient vortex generator, as well as a flow separator that would direct the air towards the Venturi channels, but will the kinematics really be like this?
The upper and lower elements of the suspension would be widely spaced: the lower triangle would be very narrow, almost echoing the Mercedes “fingerboard” idea that appeared at the start of the hybrid era in 2014, while the steering arm would be would keep behind these items.
There is no other option but to wait for the pre-season tests in Barcelona to clarify all these doubts: are these the aspects that Newey wanted to keep hidden or is there more to discover?
