The single biggest reason Red Bull dominates Formula 1

The only other bit of info i can help with is . At 30 mph there is enough down force to drive the car upside down.
This might be a problem for the heavier drivers because they would fall out of the car first..

I don't want anyone to think that I am assuming some similarity between our minute inexperienced race team and Red Bull - but funnily enough there are interesting similarities.

When I was designing and building racing motorcycle engines - I had no external help so had to keep masses of data on test results to help work out answers that I assumed people with more experience already had. But I found that analysing things afresh provided more reliable information than others with years of hands on experiences.

Similarly when several years later I happened to find myself trying to work out what an aerospace company that kept almost going bust was doing wrong I used computerised data collection to find the secret which then easily enabled us to turn the business around.

Getting back to motor racing - when we decided to build our first racing car for the Porsche Club Championship in 2012 - we had no experience of motor racing but lots of engineering and technical ability and relied on data acquisition and analysis on simple spreadsheet systems to work through alternative settings and their influences - finally developing a massive "handling" spreadsheet that worked for us - so well that in 2013 we won the Porsche Club Class 1 Championship and Team Trophy - in only our second season of racing with our own cars. Furthermore we did not build cars that had been raced by Porsche themselves before nor anyone else in that model spec - so we didn't simply copy what others had found to work over many years with 911's and 968's etc but had to work from first principles.

The other similarity is that by luck we found a local driver with similar exceptional ability compared to his fellow competitors in Tom Bradshaw and the result has been dominating the series all year raising questions about the contribution of the car and/or the driver (and resulting in the car carrying success ballast to try and reduce the winning margins and various arguments about the fairness of that etc).

So although we are laughably amateur and minute in comparison to F1 - I can honestly say that without our own reliance on data acquisition and analysis by us - we would not have managed to get the cars to handle so well that our brilliant young driver could exploit their limits so well and I do believe that the original focus of this thread was right and reveals the secret for Red Bull - a great driver and a lot of data analysis.

How I wish we had the funds to carry more sensors ourselves and then carry out more analysis - for in every other way our racing is little different - adjusting for roll, understeer, oversteer, lack of grip or premature tyre wear. I would love to be able to analyse the suspension acceleration rates and resulting pitch and roll etc through sensors rather than cable ties and measurement - but we cannot afford any more at present.

It is a mammoth subject for a small self funded team but it is the solution as far as we are concerned and we intend to do as much as we possibly can in the future to mirror what it seems Red Bull also do - as it definitely worked for us.

The days when success can be achieved with experience of random or even intelligent adjustments without technical data capture and analysis seem to us to be over.

I was told earlier in the season by a very experienced traditional engineer that I am "far too technical" in my approach to handling solutions - I wonder what he thinks now that his cars have finished behind ours despite the extra weight we were forced to carry!0

Just my small contribution form our experiences for those who may be interested.

Baz