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The causes of Red Bull's debacle in the 2024 Formula 1 season continue to emerge, where the 'scapegoat' was Sergio Perez, who was fired to give his place to Liam Lawson
Now it was Pierre Wache who brought to light the cause of Checo Perez's RB20 problems, making it clear that it had nothing to do with the Mexican
What went wrong with Sergio Perez's car?
The technical director of the energy drink team shared that it was known that it would not be an easy 2024, so winning the constructors' championship with Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez would be a complex task
"The year was basically as tough as we expected," he told Motorsport.com. "I would say we were more surprised by the beginning of the season, by the difference we had. We expected the whole year to be like the end, a big fight with the others. We ourselves did not expect such a big gap in the middle of the season, but we did expect that big fight with the rest," he said
In this regard, the French engineer revealed where they saw the problems, reinforcing the words that Helmut Marko gave at the end of the season for the failures of the RB20, with the development parts and the wind tunnel being to blame: "The story has several aspects. The first is correlation, that the car had different characteristics than we expected in of aerodynamics."
"Another aspect is that we did not expect some elements to affect the performance of the car as much as they did," he stressed. "They were not there by desire, but perhaps we did not focus enough on them. Those elements were still there at the end of the year and we have to fix them for 2025."
The wind tunnel was different from reality
Pierre Wache insisted that the data they were getting in the factory did not relate to the reality on the asphalt, something that was difficult to solve in the middle of the race weekend
"We had a loss of downforce in some areas of the map [of downforce] and therefore we didn't perform on track as we thought we could do based on the wind tunnel, so there were some holes. It's a correlation issue, and in of on-track performance it was mainly a balance issue."
Adding that "balance issues were particularly difficult to manage on the pianos and were not acted upon immediately due to how dominant the RB20 was initially, as no car came within two tenths of the Red Bull in the first five qualifying sessions in 2024"
Finally, the engineer regretted that they did not have the capacity to react, which prevented them from fighting for the constructors' championship with Max Verstappen and Checo Perez, succumbing to McLaren
"I think we detected it, but after that the car was fast and we didn't want to massively modify it," Wache itted. "When we came back to Europe and McLaren was a bigger challenge, then it started to be more and more obvious that it was one of the biggest problems for us to be faster."
This meant that the potential of the RB20 was not fully exploited, although he revealed that it would have been more detrimental if they had returned to the early season set-up where they achieved multiple victories
"In Qatar the car had the same characteristics and we were able to win fairly and make the car faster for that track. So performance is always relative to others," he concluded.