The Milton Keynes-based squad was left annoyed over the Monaco Grand Prix weekend when images of its secret floor and diffuser design were revealed in public as Sergio Perez’s crashed car was craned away in qualifying.
Several of Red Bull’s competitors have said they have gained important knowledge from the RB19 being on display, with Mercedes admitting it had a “nice clutch” of images that its aerodynamicists were looking at.
Red Bull thinks it will take until around the time of the Japanese Grand Prix for other teams to change designs if they found something interesting with the floor, but it also reckons that simply copying what they have seen will not deliver any progress.
Chief engineer Paul Monaghan said about the floor images being revealed: “It's not great. We don't put our car up [like that], but it has happened and we'll move on.
“But there's a phase lag between people seeing it, getting it onto their car and actually going faster with it. A better description is that an ignorant copy isn't necessarily going to go faster. It has to integrate. And it's not just a bit of floor geometry.”
Monaghan said that with it taking many months for design ideas to find their way onto the car, it could take until October for any copycat concepts to emerge on real cars.
“Our development path is reasonably well laid out in terms of the timings we wish to try to deploy things if they're going to make us go faster,” he said.
Source: Autosport