Having dominated the 2023 season so far by winning every race, Red Bull found itself unable to get one of its cars into Q3 for the first time since the 2018 Russian Grand Prix. While its pace was better in the race, it failed to finish on the podium.
That surprise change of form came on the same weekend that two separate rules clarifications from the FIA came into force regarding flexible body parts.
The first, known at TD18, tightened up rules regarding flexible wings – and especially tricks of teams to hide moveable mechanisms and clever designs that rotated around the nose.
The second, which had been more under the radar, was an updated version of TD39 that had originally come into play at the 2022 Canadian Grand Prix to help stamp out porpoising.
The updated wording of this directive outlawed tricks that teams may have been doing in exploiting allowances regarding flexibility of the floor around the skid block holes. There were suspicions of some outfits using this to suck their plank and floor much closer to the ground at high speed without it risking being found to have worn away too much.
But despite the timing of Red Bull’s struggles coming exactly when these new TDs came into play, the team thinks it is red herring to suggest that is why it struggled.
In fact, Red Bull team boss Christian Horner was adamant the squad had made “zero” changes to its car as a result of the new FIA stance.
Asked to explain the details about what went wrong, Horner said: “It's all engineering stuff. There's no silver bullets in this business.
“I know all of you would love to blame the TD, but unfortunately we can't even blame that, because it's not changed a single component on our car.”
Source: Autosport