RB gets 2025 design ideas with new Abu Dhabi front wing

RB has offered a glimpse at 2025 design ideas with a new front wing that it has brought to the Formula 1 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

The squad is still locked in a fight for sixth place in the constructors’ championship and has managed to get its final development of the season on the car for the finale at the Yas Marina circuit.

The squad hopes that the new design, which required new nose structure crash tests to be completed, will deliver a boost in performance but more critically an improved balance through corners.

The wing features new mainplane elements, flaps and endplates which together are all aimed at modifying the load distribution to promote a better quality of flow to the rest of the car.

RB’s racing director Alan Permane said the squad would evaluate the wing throughout practice before deciding if it commits to it for the rest of the race weekend.

“It's on both cars and we've got two of them,” he said. “We're happy with it, and we can race it here. It's legal, it has passed the crash tests, everything like that and it is aimed at just going faster. There's no special trick about it.

“It's more load, and we think a little bit more user-friendly. Some of the development has gone into making it more drivable.”

RB F1 Team VCARB 01 front wing detail (Photo by: Jon Noble)

While rival teams have pushed quite hard on flexi-wing designs for this year to improve car balance, Permane said this wing was not aimed in this area.

“This isn't an aero-elasticity update,” he said. “It's a through-corner balance characteristic change.”

While the idea behind the wing change was originally planned for the team’s 2025 challenger, Permane said that the concept was able to be introduced now.

“It's something that we've been working on for 2025,” he explained. “I wouldn’t say we've brought it forward, but it just happens to coincide here. It certainly can be carried over to next year though.”

The only other tech update brought to Abu Dhabi is from Sauber, which has introduced a revised floor and new rear brake duct deflectors.

The increased volume at the rear floor body is aimed at improving the flow characteristics by reducing the losses in critical ride height conditions, while the change in the location of the rear brake duct lower deflector is targeted at improving the rear tyre jet vortex control and increasing the overall efficiency of the diffuser.