Translation:
Rival teams have begun trying to develop their single-seaters in the direction taken by Red Bull, but they accept that reducing beam wings is complicated because of the amount of downforce they provide to help stabilize the rear end.
Red Bull’s technical director, Pierre Wache, says there is no deep secret in what his team has done, and that it is surprising that rivals have taken so long to figure out something that, instead, his team has been doing since the start of the current ground-effect era.
“The crazy thing is that people are talking about it two years after we introduced it,” Wache told Motorsport.com. “We had hundreds of tests by the FIA to see if we had used a trick or whatever, and people [even recently] don’t understand why on high downforce tracks the advantage disappears. Okay, that means they haven’t been able to figure it out yet. And that surprises us a lot.”
Speaking about this advantage realized and maintained by Red Bull was, in an accomplished manner, Andrea Stella. The McLaren team principal pointed out that, in high probability, this advantage of the Milton Keynes team will remain for some time to come.
“They seem to have been pursuing their concept for quite some time. I think they are taking advantage of the experience they have gained in developing this configuration, and I think that has become evident as time has gone on.”
“I think all the teams are now trying to understand what can be exploited by developing the same style, the same kind of direction introduced [by Red Bull].”
I think they generate a lot of downforce with the floor of the car / ground effects, allowing them to run less rear wing which increases their top speed
They say the advantage disappears on high downforce tracks. That seems to contradict this line of thought.
If you run with less rear wing the drs effect should be smaller, not larger. They are doing something different.
There’s more to it than that, because that effect would apply all the time, not just with DRS open. They’re doing something specific with DRS.
DRS doesn’t even need to be used. Checo had the same advantage without DRS when overtaking Leclerc at Spa. Sailed by as if he had DRS anyway.
But the advantage goes away on low-speed tracks, and there’s a pattern of Max seemingly winding something up to pull out a fast lap so that they can still get pole. He will always have green or yellow first or second sectors, and then an absurdly fast final sector netting overall half a second or more over the rest of the field.
