Red Bull kept the most anticipated Formula 1 car of 2025 secret until the very last moment and the more images have been revealed, the more confusing it has got.
The RB21 was first revealed through a series of studio images the team published the day before pre-season testing begins in Bahrain.
Red Bull said this was the RB21 but if it was, it did not look like a new car. Or even an evolution of RB20. It just looked like the 2024 car with maybe very, very minor tweaks.
That did not seem right.
After dominating the first two years of the ground-effect rules era, plus the start of 2024 to boot, Red Bull’s car suddenly needed corrective action.
Some work to mitigate the worst of its troubles was achievable last year and helped Max Verstappen get his drivers’ championship over the line. But the constructors’ title wasn’t salvageable and having been overhauled by McLaren and Ferrari, Red Bull needed bigger changes that only a winter’s work could really facilitate.
However, the images revealed by Red Bull initially didn’t scream ‘overhaul’. And even though the bulk of that work could have taken place with the underfloor or the diffuser at the rear of the car, out of view in these images, it still felt like a misdirect.
This wouldn’t be a huge surprise seeing as Red Bull has often been at the more secretive end of the car launch spectrum in the past. Surely, then, the car would look very different on track?
But when Red Bull posted pictures of the RB21 from the shakedown in Bahrain later on Tuesday it looked just like the images we had been so quick to dismiss earlier. And no matter how many side-by-side comparisons we checked from last year's mid-season upgrade, the differences between the late-2024 car and this ostensibly new design were scarce-to-none.
The question is why? Either Red Bull’s run its 2024 car for some reason so far and everybody involved is calling it the RB21 for maximum misdirection, or the full picture of its 2025 changes are either not understood or are indeed being kept hidden.
“Well the RB21 visually to the RB20 looks very similar,” admitted team boss Christian Horner.
“But the devil is in the detail. And almost every single surface, every single component on the car, has been changed, upgraded, refined and improved.
“So we’ll get a first indication of what we’ve managed to achieve in these next few days testing.”
The car could still be a complete bluff - maybe there are new front and rear wings, a new floor, even other bodywork ready to be deployed in Bahrain during the test, or for the first race in Australia. Horner referred to it as “effectively a systems check for the car” and “we felt this year it was right to do it just before the first test” – was that a hint, or just an irrelevant turn of phrase?
This could be a complete bluff - maybe there are new front and rear wings, a new floor, even other bodywork ready to be deployed in Bahrain during the test, or for the first race in Australia. Team boss Christian Horner referred to Tuesday's run as a "a good systems check in preparation for tomorrow" - was that a hint, or just an irrelevant turn of phrase?
If it is the real thing, though, what could that imply? Perhaps Red Bull is confident that its base 2024 concept – the one that was clearly the fastest car in the first six events of last year – is still fundamentally superior to others but was hamstrung for other reasons, be that Red Bull’s own development missteps or the way rivals latched onto flexi-wing exploitation.
With teams having the green light to be aggressive with aeroelasticity until round nine of 2025 in June, maybe Red Bull’s surface-level changes really are small, and the biggest differences are unseen ones like the underfloor, or the construction of the front wing to allow for greater deflection under load?
That would almost certainly still demand reprofiling other aerodynamic surfaces further down the car, though. But maybe those more visible elements are coming later.
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There’s another, surely unthinkable option: maybe this really is it, and it is a fairly straightforward evolution because Red Bull decided that the full suite of changes required to address the RB20’s weaknesses came at too great a development cost. Especially if the key to the fix was flexi-wing trickery that’ll be outlawed after just a few races.
It’s hard to imagine Red Bull throwing in the towel, though, let alone Verstappen accepting that as a strategy!
“We know a few of the limitations we had last year,” said Verstappen.
“What is most important is over the coming days we’ll try to see if that actually improved.
“Today it’s not about that. It’s me getting comfortable in the car, see if everything fits, and then the next three days hopefully we can learn a bit more about the car.”
The RB21 reveal is shrouded in enough mystery, though, that informed speculation is all we have to go on for now – adding an extra layer of intrigue to an already fascinating week of testing, just as it’s about to begin.
