Racing
© Jonathan Borba
Red Bull used its Silverstone filming day to trial a heavily revised RB22, with Max Verstappen testing a Ferrari-style rotating rear wing alongside front-wing and sidepod changes ahead of the Miami Grand Prix.
Trackside images from Wednesday’s running showed the clearest sign yet that Red Bull is searching for a wider aerodynamic reset after its difficult start to the 2026 season. The car carried new winglets on the front-wing endplates, while the sidepods appeared reshaped with a revised rearward ramp that extends the upper surface further towards the rear wheels.
The biggest talking point was the rear wing. Images indicated Red Bull had produced its own version of Ferrari’s much-discussed “Macarena” concept, the rotating design first seen on the SF-26 in pre-season testing in Bahrain. But Red Bull’s interpretation appears simpler. Where Ferrari’s system is said to hide its actuators within the rear-wing endplate fences, Red Bull seemed to retain a central vertical actuator and alter the connection between the flap and the endplates to achieve the inverted rotation.
Paolo Filisetti, RacingNews365 technical analyst, said the RB22’s flap rotates so “the hollow side faces downward and the convex side faces upward,” creating “a profile comparable to an aircraft wing, generating lift rather than downforce.”
Filisetti said that difference in layout reflects a more conservative Red Bull approach. He reported Ferrari’s SF-26 can rotate by more than 200 degrees using dual actuators concealed in the endplates, while Red Bull’s version is limited to about 110 to 120 degrees of movement. By keeping the central actuator and restricting the range, Red Bull appears to have chosen faster implementation and lower mechanical complexity over the full aerodynamic potential of Ferrari’s design.
That matters because Ferrari itself has still not committed the concept to race-weekend use. After unveiling the rotating wing in Bahrain testing, Ferrari briefly ran it again in first practice in China before reverting to a more conventional rear wing for the rest of the weekend. Lewis Hamilton said at the time it was “maybe a little bit premature” to use the design at a race after he spun in FP1 in Shanghai.
Red Bull is therefore pushing into one of the most ambitious 2026 aero ideas before even Ferrari has proven it in competitive conditions. Whether its simpler version reaches the RB22 in Miami remains unclear, but the Silverstone test showed the team is willing to rework multiple areas of the car at once as it tries to recover performance.