F1 Tech | Red Bull debuts bold updates during filming day at Silverstone

Red Bull Racing surprised everyone by hitting the track in Silverstone for a 200 km filming day with Max Verstappen to test the new aerodynamic package that will debut in Miami.

The RB22 showcased new parts, including a new floor, sidepods and a new front wing.

The team is hopeful that these changes will improve the car's delicate balance and overall performance, which have made the car really nervous and unstable in the cornering phase. Let’s take a closer look at the updates.

The beginning of the 2026 F1 season has been one of those to forget for Red Bull Racing, with just 16 points scored in the first three races. The RB22 has proven to be nervous and difficult to tune across different layouts, proof that the issues were lying in some of the fundamentals of the car established during the winter.

Conscious that the development process would have taken time and resources, Red Bull took full advantage of the month-long break in April to organise a filming day (as also done by Ferrari) and run new parts on the car to assess their impact on the RB22’s behaviour and on performance.

A few days after racing at the Nürburgring Nordschleife, Max Verstappen came back on track today to complete the 200 km filming day in Silverstone the team had organised.

The day was meant not only to take commercial shots, but especially to test a new aerodynamic package that was fitted to the car and that will debut in Miami.

Videos and pictures of the event showed some interesting changes to the front wing, sidepod and floor area, which suggest that a massive amount of work has been done at the factory to try and improve the car’s performance, especially from the aerodynamic point of view.

As for the front wing, this element appears to have a more pointed mainplane shape than the previous version, which instead featured a wavy leading edge.

Furthermore, a dive plane has been added to the front wing endplate, in line with the solution adopted by other top teams. This particular detail is designed to generate a vortex at the end that then seals the floor edge, preventing turbulence from the front wing from being sucked under the floor itself.

The sidepods have a very different shape compared to the version introduced at Suzuka: as shown in the photo above, the upper profile of the sidepod has a broken shape sloping downwards, designed to create a channel and increase the airflow towards the rear diffuser.

The team's goal is likely to make this new component work in synergy with the new front wing and the new floor (of which there are not enough clear photos to observe noteworthy details), to increase the downforce generated by the bodywork and make the car more stable, especially in medium and high-speed corners, where the RB22 slid a lot in the first three races of the season due to excessive understeer.

It is still too early to determine whether these components have had a positive impact, but the chance for the team to make private running and test all the different solutions more calmly can allow engineers to compare all the data from the track with those seen in the simulations.

This is a good starting point for the Miami Grand Prix weekend, where the Sprint format will also force engineers to condense all the testing runs in the single practice hour, before already preparing for the Sprint qualifying on Friday afternoon.