How Red Bull Ended Up With An Unbeatable Monster

Thank you for watching!
Today we're talking about the Red Bull RB19, one of the most dominant Formula 1 cars ever made. This video is a little longer than usual, but I think it turned out alright.
We dig into the history of Honda in F1 and how they transformed from a laughing stock to the best engine on the grid, the suspension that makes the RB19 so special, their tricky DRS, the budget cap violation from 2021, and more.

Music in this video:
Yuzzy - Debunking
Soundridemusic - Criminal Tension
White Bat Audio - The Drop
Stomp's Playlist - 3 Hours of Lofi
White Bat Audio - Gaia

[Gangsta_Playz]

The W11 was a lot like the F-15 Eagle, it was built to conquer an almighty competitor, that turned out to be something way worse than predicted

[legoferrari]

The RB19 makes those fictional super-teams you see in media like Ravenwest from the GRID games look entirely believable; unless *seismic* changes happen in red bull, I don't see things changing until the new car concept for 2026 if even then.

[_-TC]

THANK YOU for praising Honda so much at the beginning of the video. In a way they are really not discussed much at all in regards to good performance compared to how Mercedes was praised for years on end. Not once have I heard anyone talk positively about the Honda engine during the broadcasts (it's always "OP DRS" and despite the engine, not because of), and even in the official F1 games the Honda engine is the 2nd or 3rd best after Mercedes (at least last time I checked), which just doesn't make any sense at this point. They are the biggest reason Red Bull are winning - without them Adrian Newey would have not been compelled enough to give it his all once more.

[ThePhilip]

Checo proved that it wasn't just the RB19.

[rientsdijkstra]

Major factor in the transformation to unbeatable monster: the human fly by wire system called "Max Verstappen". It may be that the RB19 was more "stable" in the sense of aerodynamic efficiency through the antidive and antisquat geometry, in another way the secret of the speed of the RB19 is actually its UNstability. To see this we can look at fighter jets like F16. These are intentionally built slightly unstable. This feature, which is called relaxed static stability (RSS), gives the plane both reduced air resistance and better manouvrability. To still make the F16 controllable by a human pilot is not controlled directly by the pilot but via a fly by wire system that inputs the commands of the pilot to a computer, which performs continual small corrections to compensate for the unstability of the platform. More or less the same thing goes for racingcars where a car with lots of front end grip ("pointy") and relatively "loose" rear end, which is easy to "rotate", are know to be the fastest design. The problem with such unstable "nervous" designs is, however, that they are hard to control. But in F1 such computer controlled fly by wire is of course not allowed. Which means that it is the skill of the driver that determines how pointy, nervous and unstable (and thus fast) the car can be made. It is here that Verstappen really shines, because there is no other driver who can handle a car as nervous and pointy as Verstappen can. As Alex Albon (who also like a pointy nervous car...) told in another video: "Verstappen is on another level, when you try to drive a car that is set up for Verstappen, it is like you try to play a computergame with the sensitivity of the mouse turned up to the max...". It is also this inbuilt pointyness and nervousness of the Red Bulls that causes so many problems for Verstappens teammates like Perez, Kvyat and Albon, because they can't handle this, and start making mistakes, or actually become slower, because they can not drive their natural style in the RB. Also many have compared Verstappen to Michael Schumacher who is another driver who liked and could handle a very nervously setup car, and got his speed from that. So there you have it: this inbuilt nervousness and the the fact that Verstappen has the talent to drive a car with a faster but more hard to handle setup than all of the other drivers in the current circuit is one very important factor in the RB19 being so bloody fast.
O and by the way: it may look like Verstappen makes very few steering movements in the corner, but as Albon said, that is an illusion: Verstappen continuously makes very small corrections to keep his nervous car on the desired trajectory.

[Davitamon]

"How Red Bull Ended Up With An Unbeatable Monster" Everything you said AND they put a guy called Max in it. He was the differentiating factor. Combine that with a team who where almost flawless in their strategies and execution on the race weekend and there you have it. The RB19 was a fenomenal car but in my opinion it really was the perfomance that Max showed that took it to the levels of domenation we saw.

[alaeriia]

Let's not forget that Max Verstappen has evolved really wide-apart eyes to see around the halo. (Or, more importantly, he is capable of handling extremely twitchy cars, which are incredibly fast if you can keep them on the road and out of the barriers.)

[KevinLiauJiaJie]

0:38, I think you meant to say Thailand instead of Taiwan otherwise great video essay!

[BariumCobaltNitrogn]

If Red Bull started making production cars, the first model would be a 200/mph lowered minivan - a "family" car that dad wouldn't mind driving. The Red Bull WTF-1.

[SingaporeLoveItachi]

Every single saturday is a wee bit misleading - the RB19's qualifying pace in SPA and Suzuka is superb.

[hankrearden]

Great video, but i think one of the missed factors about what made the car unbeatable that really wasn't mentioned is Max himself. Perez underperformed by a lot. But i don't think the car was as easy to drive as some think it was. Albon brought this up in an interview about his time with Red Bull. That Max can make a tricky car look easy to drive when it's not. That the faster he pushed to catch Max the more unstable the car became for him. I think we've seen Perez suffer from this as well.

[drchtct]

I think younger kids will finally understand what we went through when Mercedes dominated from 2014-2020. Oh you are already tired of Verstappen? He dominates for two years now (2021 was 50/50 with Merc), we went through SEVEN years of Merc dominance

[henkormel]

One remark the W11 was a dominant car with a good driver. The RB19 is a good car with a dominant driver as Pérez is showing.

[Crossovahh]

The engineering and maths in these machines are just insane. Crazy what humans can achieve when they work together

[mohammadsafwan]

feels good to see the team I supported since 2016 do soo well. I remember the first time i went to A f1 race, i feel in love with the 2014 blue car with red bull decals driven by Seb. Eventhough i was too small to understand the world of f1, i did not forget the experience when i finally started to understand the sport. Seeing max with the same blue car, dominating is just something else

[hattorihonzo]

Dude this has been the best detailed deep dive into the RB19 I’ve ever seen. I’ll be watching more of your videos in the future.

[JM_daDoc]

What the narrator didn't mention is that Max honed his driving style to make sure the car remains very stable through corners. He manages to restrain himself, brake a little earlier, keep the car flat and get on the power soon enough... He doesn't think it's very much fun but gets the most out of it in different circumstances.

[DJChappie]

The RB19 was only so dominant in 1 man's hands.

[jeffcanfixit]

EXCELLENT video, EXCELLENT work all the way around. 👍👍🏁

[Real]

Respectfully, your data analysis has some issues.

A dominant _car_ wouldnt be dominant if only 1 of the 2 drivers can get everything out of it. That speaks to how good Max is more than how good the RB19 is.

A dominant _car_ will enable both drivers on a team to easily be quicker than every other team. As someone who detests Mercedes, it is withgreat dismay that I tell you that the 2015 Mercedes W06 was more dominant.

In that year, Nico and Lewis had a combined average finish of 3.21. in 2023, Max and Checo had a combined average finish of 4.25.

Now, taking this a step further, a car being dominant should also have a big gap to its competitors, else its not "dominant", just better.

I went back and took the time delta between the winner and the next closest competitor from a different team. I averaged those numbers.

In 2015, Mercedes had an average delta to its closest competitor of 19.702 seconds. In 2023, Max (lol checo only won once) had a delta average of 15.89.

That 2015 season was by far the most dominant CAR F1 has ever seen. Ive done this analysis compared to other years, like Schumachers era, Mclarens era, etc. A few of those come close to this 2015 season.

Trust me, i don't like it but it is what it is. And to think Toto admitted that in the 2014-2017 years they were DETUNING the engine so the FIA wouldn't hit them with a BOP. It could have been _even_ faster.

But all the records that Max broke, mostly happened due to the length of the season. And the fact that his teammate couldn't even finish in the top 5, let alone second shows that the RB19 was great, but Max was greater. Because anither stat that would show this is if we compared the delta of where one driver finished compared to the other, to get a sense for how easy the car was to drive. Checo isnt that bad of a driver, the RB19 is just a lot harder to drive than the W06 was.

If we did an adjustment for season length and then applied that to Mercedes, theyd have amassed more total constructors points than RB in 2023 simply because Lewis and Nico finished much higher in the order on average per race than Max and Checo.