Red Bull have removed their ‘upside-down’ rear wing for the Belgian Grand Prix amid safety worries after two crashes suffered by Max Verstappen in as many weekends. The Dutchman crashed in qualifying for the Austrian Grand Prix at the end of June and suffered the same fate during the British Grand Prix earlier this month.
Both incidents, Verstappen felt, were caused by a “super dangerous” flaw in the rear wing design on his car. On both occasions, Red Bull‘s version of the ‘macarena’ rear wing, which was pioneered by Ferrari in pre-season testing before they actually started to race with it earlier this season, failed to close properly when entering a high-speed corner.
The lack of downforce then saw the car spin off track on both occasions and Verstappen made it clear after the second crash at Silverstone that he wanted to see changes made. “It’s super dangerous because you can really hurt yourself two times, the four-time world champion fumed.
Team principal Laurent Mekies understood his driver’s frustration and said after the Silverstone race that his team would “put in place what is necessary for it not to happen again”. And it has now been confirmed that Red Bull have chosen to, at least temporarily, move away from the design and race with a more conventional rear wing at Spa-Francorchamps.
Red Bull held a filming day test at Silverstone last week, days after the British Grand Prix, which is said to have helped the team to zero in on the exact problem. It is understood that the ‘macarena’ design could return at future race weekends, once Red Bull are happy that they have implemented a fix for the issue.
Ferrari were the first to begin racing with the unconventional design, debuting it competitively at the Miami Grand Prix in May after extensive testing. Red Bull soon followed and McLaren have developed their own version, though they have yet to use it on a race weekend despite taking it with them to the Austrian Grand Prix last month.
The original plan was for McLaren to test it in free practice, but that never happened. Explaining why McLaren chose to delay the part’s on-track debut, engineering technical director Neil Houldey said: “We were working incredibly hard back at the factory just to get something out here to enable us to test, working in the lab.
“We managed to get it flown out but when it arrived, we did some further testing that we knew we had to do to sign it off before it was able to run. Unfortunately, it didn’t pass the tests we needed to complete, so we’re sending it back and we’re going to delay that. We’ll try and run it when we’ve next got some fixes that we need to put in place.
“I think [it’s] disappointing for everyone back at the factory with the amount of effort that was put in, but actually the right decision is that we needed the track time. Although we didn’t get it for other reasons, we needed the track time on the car that we knew we were going to be running further into the weekend.”