"I know from speaking to Adrian Newey that it’s not over yet": Bad news for Red Bull rivals as Pat Symonds shares 'There’s plenty more to come'

F1 CTO Pat Symonds has said that after his conversation with Red Bull CTO Adrian Newey, he believes that "there’s plenty more to come" from the Austrian team.

Symonds has been one of the key figures behind introducing the new regulations in the 2022 season, which saw teams introducing ground-effect cars. Since the regulations were introduced, Red Bull have been the dominant car, winning consecutive driver's and constructor's titles.

Their 2023 and early 2024 season dominance has worried the rivals despite Ferrai driver Carlos Sainz's recent win at the Austrian GP. While appearing on the Beyond the Grid podcast, Pat Symonds said that after his chat with Newey, he was confident that there were more areas of development for the new cars.

He cited the Red Bull's drastic change in concept as an example of the regulations having more room to grow. He said:

"We iterate towards it, and we’re seeing that iteration in certain areas, the downwash sidepods are becoming the way to do things, but when you look at something like this year’s Red Bull, interesting intakes into the sidepods, intakes above the sort of the headrest area, lots of things, I can’t say I anticipated exactly that was the way it was going."

“But I am very pleased to see there are still changes, and I know from speaking to Adrian Newey that it’s not over yet. There’s plenty more to come.”

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Red Bull CTO chimes in on the drastic design of the RB20

Red Bull Chief Technical Officer Adrian Newey has said that the RB20 was a third-generation evolution of their RB18.

Speaking to the F1 Nation podcast, Newey said:

“The underlying architecture of the car is the third-generation evolution of what started as the RB18, where, apart from the radiators, we carry everything: layout of the front suspension, the rear suspension, the gearbox, the casing – it's a third evolution of the RB18."

"The bits that are visible, that have caused quite a lot of attention, obviously we’re pursuing aerodynamic gains there. The visual change is actually much larger than the performance change you get from that."

It is certainly worrying for the rest of the grid that the Austrian team can unlock more performance from the RB20 as the Australian GP had given slight hope to the rest of the grid.

It would be interesting to see the areas in which the world champions further upgrade the 2024 challenger and make it more dominant.