Red Bull’s only ever sold its 2026 Formula 1 launch as a “livery launch”, but you may notice the car it’s revealed is very different from the showcar we’ve seen before.
The showcar at the actual event was very much the 2026 showcar used by Formula 1, which Memento built.
But the studio images Red Bull revealed are different in multiple aspects from the 2026 showcar we’ve seen so far.
This studio car represents Red Bull’s own visualisation of the rules while stopping short of being a definite hint at the final RB22.
It might be that Red Bull wants its own more realistic show car to use – Memento does take individual, customised commissions from any of the teams.
The differences are plentiful. We can see the first hints of detail work around the front and rear wings, the new-look front wing endplates, and front brake ducts while further back there’s a lot more refinement.
The sidepods are much more contoured and tightly packaged, leaving a greater part of the floor exposed – with a little more detail in the rear corner.
At the front of the floor, the forward fence is a much clearer evolution of an actual design, split into three elements rather than one big block – it actually looks like a light version of the super complex bargeboards that used to occupy the space around the front of the sidepod and floor before the 2022 rules eliminated them.
The cockpit is further back than the F1 model – which is what you’d want in terms of optimising the car’s physics – and the front suspension is pushrod compared to pullrod on the F1 model, which seems like an odd detail to go to the effort of changing if it isn’t a hint of the RB22.
But barring a shakedown appearance before then, we’ll have to wait until the first day of the opening pre-season test at Barcelona later this month, to see the true RB22 and whether any of these elements feature.
