We had a lot of controversy last year about Red Bull owning two Formula 1 teams with title rival McLaren urging Formula 1 to ban multi-team ownership.
For 2025, Red Bull Racing and its junior team Racing Bulls now work from the same campus in Milton Keynes and have previously said that they were going to work as closely as the regulations allowed.
That means both teams sharing the majority of the mechanical parts that make up the car - front and rear suspension and gearbox - but the aerodynamic surfaces still need to be the independent intellectual property of each team.
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That said, going into the fourth year of these regulations, if all the cars' aerodynamic surfaces were painted with the same colour scheme, most of us (and I include myself in this) would struggle to identify which car they were looking at. I'm also pretty sure the commentators would struggle just as much.
So let's go through a bit of a comparison between the 2024 Red Bull and the 2025 Racing Bulls - and, to confuse us even more, a couple of 2024 Racing Bulls comparisons are thrown in for good measure.
Front wing and suspension
Front wing-wise, as required in the regulations, the two teams are reasonably different. The Racing Bulls has a more consistent leading edge (red highlight) and the wing loading which is defined by the profile of the trailing edge of the rearmost flap (green highlight) is slightly further outboard just at the inside of the front tyre.
Looking at a comparison of the front suspension, which is part of the mechanical side of these cars, and taking into account what is probably a small scaling difference, the 2024 Red Bull and 2025 Racing Bulls look fairly identical from this angle as you'd expect.
Radiator inlet
Radiator intake-wise the two cars have fairly similar concepts but then most of the teams have to some degree followed this 'Peaky Blinders hat brim' inlet concept (red ellipse) that Red Bull introduced at the beginning of 2024.
Racing Bulls also has the vertical inlet (green ellipse) on the side of the chassis. It's probably smaller than the Red Bull version but that might just be because of the shadow and the colour difference.
Sidepod
Looking through the front suspension from behind again, the mechanical parts look identical, but the profile of the undercut of the sidepod (green highlight) transposed from a fit on the Red Bull to the Racing Bulls is significantly different.
Floor
There are small but subtle differences to the floor fin, which is there to manage the turbulent wake coming off the front tyre.
As everyone uses the same tyre the wake is the same up and down the pitlane so it's no surprise that the management of it should be fairly similar.
The sidepod/radiator inlet outer corner that is highlighted in red above is different, as is the vertical inlet highlighted in green. The outer floor fin is again highlighted with the light blue ellipse in this side view, showing the differences in the cutouts that induce a vortex coming off the top corner trailing edge.
Rear suspension
The rear suspension layout - and if we could see it the gearbox - looks if not identical then very similar, as you'd expect from a shared component.
I think this side view of the 2024 VCARB 01, the RB20 and the 2025 VCARB 02 show that all the cars are very similar, but I do think that the two Racing Bulls cars clearly come from the same family of design.
So summing up, using as much of the mechanical components as possible from Red Bull will effectively increase the size of Racing Bulls as a company. It will allow more of its design engineers time to focus on optimising what is left for them mechanically to come up with and, on top of that, the integration of the aerodynamic surfaces.
As it's now the fourth year of these regulations and it is using more components from Red Bull than ever before, this should be Minardi/Toro Rosso/AlphaTauri/RB/Racing Bull's best year. If not, questions will be ask.
