Red Bull’s decision to make aggressive design choices with their🎐 RB20 car has been questioned with a comparison to when Adrian Newey got it “horribly wrong” during his time at McLaren.

Even though Red Bull dominated the 2023 F1 season, winning 21 of the 22 races, the team has heavily 𝓀revised their car for this year, particularly around the sidepod area.

To the naked eye, the RB20 sidepods are in a similar style to Mercedes’ from the start of last year, whiꦯch were often - wrongly - pointed at as the reason for their drop in 🐈performance.

During F1’s🐎 testing coverage in Bahrain, commentator Alex Jacques made reference to when the Newey-designed McLaren MP4-18 was plagued with problems early on.

“How do you make the right choiꦿce? How do you make the wrong choice? Does Adrian Newey ever get iওt wrong?” Jacques said.

“If you remember the McLaren that he got horribly wrong. It was the MP4-18, which was revolutionary at the time, had things like a blown diffuser, w﷽hich we’d seen many൩, many years later.

“He hasn’t always got it right, and McLaren had to reve🥀rt to the old car back then.

“It w♎ould be fascinating wouldn’t it if Red Bull needed to pick a B-spec RB20.”

Former F1 driver Jolyon Palmer pointed out that Newey’s las🧸t arguablyꦕ flop was 21 years ago - a lengthy time.

“When we go back 21 years… that was a rare miss, wasn’t it? That was a rare miss in the Newey catalog🔯ue o♎f hits,” Palmer said.

Palmer - who drove for Renault in 2016 and 2017 - believes Red Bull’s track record of delivering great cars, even during Mercedes’ dominant years, means it’s unlikely the R🍸B20 will take them backwards.

“When you see this Red Bull that looks something different to the rest, when was the last time Red Bull had a miss? Because in the Mercedes-dominant years, Lewis won the titles and Nico Rosberg had one, it was M꧅ercedes dominating,” he added.

“But Red Bull had the Renault engine at the time then they switched to Honda and it took a while to get to Mercedes’ level of performance but the c♚hassis was always superb.

“The aerodynamics was superb and Ricciardo could win in🌞 Monaco, he won in 2014 on tracks like Hungary, where you need the aerodynamic pe🐼rformance, you need the chassis to be really good.

“On the long straights they were hopeless. At Monza they would always take a grid place penaltꦫy because they would just write it off as♑ a weekend and that’s the power unit really.

“I can’t remember the last time Red Bu🍸ll didn’t have ඣa very strong chassis, aero package.”