Red Bull showed the RB19 in New York on 3 February 2023, ahead of every other team, with Christian Horner, Max Verstappen, Sergio Perez and Daniel Ricciardo on stage. No Formula One team had launched a car in the United States before, and the event went out to more than thirty countries. Horner used it to announce that Ford would join Red Bull Powertrains to build an engine for the 2026 rules. The team was defending both titles after winning 17 of 22 races in 2022, but it came into 2023 with a handicap: for breaking the 2021 cost cap it had been fined $7 million and had its aerodynamic testing allowance cut by a tenth, to 63% of what the seventh-placed team was allowed.
It was the second year of the ground-effect regulations, and the floor had been changed under everyone. To stop the porpoising of 2022 the FIA raised the floor edges and the diffuser throat, which took some of the bite out of the "ice skate" floor edge Red Bull had led with on the RB18, so the RB19 went back to a more conventional edge wing. The chassis was cut away harder in its lower half into more of a V, to feed cleaner air to the floor. The sidepods kept their downwash ramp and were reshaped twice, raising and widening the lower lip of the inlet at Baku and again in Hungary. The suspension stayed pull-rod at the front and push-rod at the rear, a harder layout to package but one that kept the centre of gravity low. The RB18 had been overweight, and getting the RB19 down to the 798 kg minimum was, by Honda's account, the biggest single gain. At first glance it looked very like the 2022 car, yet the gap to the rest grew.
Honda's racing arm, HRC, still supplied the power unit, now badged Honda RBPT: a 1.6-litre turbocharged V6 limited to 15,000 rpm, with power development frozen and only reliability changes allowed. Where the car stood out most was on the straights with its wing open. At Jeddah it ran a single-element beam wing, and Lewis Hamilton, passed with ease, said he had "never seen a car so fast". By June Formula 1's own technical writers were still looking for the reason it gained more from DRS than its rivals, and pointing at how closely the diffuser ramp met the lower beam wing. The price of all that downforce at low ride height was bumps: the RB19 was least comfortable on rough tracks that forced it to run higher.
It won from the first race. In Bahrain Verstappen took pole by 0.138 seconds from Perez, led everywhere but briefly around the first stops, and won by 12 seconds for a one-two. It was his first win there, at the tenth attempt, a year after both cars had retired from the race. Perez won in Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan; from Miami onwards Verstappen won every race through to Monza. His win in Canada was his 41st, level with Ayrton Senna, and Red Bull's 100th. In Hungary he won by 33.7 seconds for the team's twelfth straight victory, counting the last race of 2022, which broke the eleven McLaren had managed with Senna and Alain Prost in 1988; Horner had watched that run as a child. Verstappen arrived at his home race at Zandvoort on eight wins in a row and made it nine, and a tenth at Monza took him past Sebastian Vettel's record of nine in a row.
Singapore was the only race that got away, on exactly the kind of bumpy street circuit the car disliked. Carlos Sainz won it for Ferrari, Verstappen was fifth and Perez eighth, and Red Bull's run of 15 straight wins was over. The team clinched the constructors' title at the next race, in Japan, and Verstappen took his third drivers' title at the Qatar sprint. The RB19 finished the year with 21 wins from 22 races, 95.45%, beating the 15 from 16 of McLaren's MP4/4 in 1988, along with 14 poles, 30 podiums and 11 fastest laps, and it led 1,149 of the season's 1,325 laps. Verstappen's share was 19 wins, 21 podiums and 575 points; Perez was second on 285, Red Bull's first one-two in the drivers' championship, and the team scored 860 points to Mercedes' 409.
FanHome's 1:8 partwork is the officially licensed build of Verstappen's car. FanHome is DeAGOSTINI's US brand, and De Agostini announced the kit in April 2025 as a model in metal and ABS more than 27 inches long, with working suspension, steering linked to the steering wheel, rubber tyres and a replica of the Honda RBPT 1.6-litre V6 turbo hybrid. It runs to 119 stages, sent monthly — two stages in the first package, three in each of the next two and five a month after that — with the magazines as digital downloads and a screwdriver the only tool needed. Stages 9 to 18 assemble much of the power unit: the engine blocks and turbo, intake manifolds, airbox, fuel pump, MGU-K and exhaust manifolds. A transparent display case, 34 × 17 × 12 in, is an option delivered with the final package. The first package of this one arrived in March 2026.