Red Bull Racing have acknowledged that merely reproducing parts or ideas of its sister team Racing Bulls will not enable it to address its present predicament that is afflicting its Formula 1 car. Although the junior team has been delivering surprisingly good results and particularly, during qualification sessions, Red Bull carries more than component swapping problems which are largely embedded deeper in the outfit.

With Yuki Tsunoda behind the wheel and, during the season, Liam Lawson, Racing Bulls promoted by the Red Bull team, has been able to beat the Red Bull vehicle at a few occasions this year. Indeed, it has competed at least nine times with the junior team qualifying or racing well ahead or neck and neck with Red Bull, even though the junior team boasts lesser resource and a small technical team. Not even Max Verstappen who has frankly been almost unbeatable in recent years, suffered at the Austrian GP; Lawson set a qualifying lap only 0.006s slower than the current champion. It was not merely an accident at that moment and point, but it was a message.

But, the problems of the Red Bull according to the Laurent Mekies, team boss of Racing Bulls, are structural and not superficial. The existing RB21 has a problem of balance, grip and predictability as a whole. Back in Hungary, Verstappen himself was heard to say he could not understand what is wrong with the car, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the car. It is a forthright confession on the part of one who is famous to get everything out of any assignment to which he gets.

Racing Bulls are demonstrations of flashes of brilliance, but design efforts want to overly emphasize the reliability of a baseline operation. Red Bull, in its turn, has also been pursuing the state of maximum performance, sometimes at the cost of regularity. That disparity in its philosophy is beginning to show fractures. Mekies explained that a way to replicate the performance of Racing Bulls is not a possible remedy. Relative interchange of components or designs cannot solve the fundamental faults hardcoded in Red Bull vehicle.

This scenario is just an indicator of this larger fact in Formula 1, that technical genius is not always adaptive. The problem is that Red Bull used to dominate previous seasons with the help of a mighty car, however the competitors have closed the gap, so now one can see their weak points. Effective solution will probably entail a broad change to the basic design of the car, not simply aping what is working on another one–maybe having to do with suspension geometry, aero flow and chassis load behavior.

Concisely, Red Bull is going through a turning point. Copying the ideas of Racing Bulls could be the marginal improvement but the real solution will only be found in the engineering. And that championship is as high stakes as it is ever going to get, and they are running out of time.

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