“Last year we had a great car which was the most dominant car ever, and we basically turned it into a monster,” Max Verstappen said after an anonymous performance at the weekend’s Italian Grand Prix.
It was a brutal summary of the team’s problems as it slumped to sixth successive defeat, its longest losing streak since 2020.
Just two of those six winless races have been podiums, and only one of them — the rain-affected British Grand Prix — has been close.
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Qualifying seventh and finishing sixth in Italy is by far the worst result of the lot.
The Dutchman was an astounding 0.695 seconds off pole on Saturday and crossed the finish line a demoralising 38 seconds adrift.
He was 15 seconds behind the next-closest car and gained one place from his starting slot only because George Russell had a first-lap crash.
All this at a track at which Verstappen celebrated a record-breaking 10th successive victory last year at a time him and his team looked totally unstoppable.
“I’ve said a lot and now it’s up to the team to come with a lot of changes with the car, because we basically went from a very dominant car to an undriveable car in the space of six to eight months,” he fumed, comparing this year to last. “That is very weird for me and we need to really turn the car upside down.”
“With how we are at the moment we are bad everywhere, so we need a lot of changes.”
Then came the alarm.
“At the moment both championships are not realistic.”
Many in the paddock have already written off the constructors championship to McLaren, which is now just eight points adrift.
But Verstappen is still 62 points ahead of Lando Norris at the top of the drivers standings, requiring and eight-point-per-race turnaround to close.
To say that this chunky lead is at risk speaks to just how dire Verstappen sees the team’s outlook.
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WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
There are two sides to the coin of Red Bull Racing’s decline.
One side is that the chasing pack, in particular McLaren, has caught up since May’s Miami Grand Prix four months ago.
But the reverse side is a story of Red Bull Racing simultaneously losing its way.
That itself is a story told in two parts.
The first is that as Red Bull Racing has had to turn up the wick and push its car harder, it’s discovered limitations it previously hadn’t encountered.
It’s similar to last year’s Singapore Grand Prix, where a precise set of circumstances handed the team its first and only defeat of the entire year.
McLaren’s strengthening challenge is pushing the same buttons.
Average gap to pole, last five dry rounds
1. McLaren: 0.081 seconds
2. Red Bull Racing: 0.124 seconds
3. Mercedes: 0.431 seconds
4. Ferrari: 0.479 seconds
Team principal Christian Horner said it took Monza to bring out the worst in his car and lay its problems bare.
“I think [Monza] has exposed the deficiencies we have in the car versus last year, and I think that we have a very clear issue, which has been highlighted this weekend, we know we have to get on top of and address, otherwise we put ourselves under massive pressure,” Horner said, per Racer.
The second part is that Red Bull Racing’s development program has actively made the car more difficult to drive by exacerbating those deficiencies.
Adding downforce is relatively straightforward under these ground effect rules, but making that downforce usable is a real challenge.
Partly that’s because simulating the ground effect is difficult because it relies on precisely measuring the interaction between the floor and the ground. In the wind tunnel or in computer simulation the ground is effectively a perfect flat surface. In the real world asphalt is varied and changeable.
But it’s also a function of this being the third year of the regulations. The low-hanging fruit has all been picked. Teams are looking for smaller gains further out of reach, and increasingly they’re overextending themselves.
Development rate, frontrunners
1. McLaren: improved by 0.520 seconds
2. Mercedes: improved by 0.220 seconds
3. Red Bull Racing: degraded by 0.363 seconds
4. Ferrari: degraded by 0.543 seconds
‘It hurts’ – Ferrari outsmarts McLaren | 02:37
For Red Bull Racing this is manifesting itself in chronic balance problems — that is, unmanageable oversteer or understeer.
Worse still is that the drivers have reported both oversteer and understeer in one corner, one following the other.
Usually a team can trade understeer for oversteer or vice versa by adding downforce to either end of the car or through suspension changes. Solving both at the same time is much harder.
“I think that recent upgrades, whilst it put [aerodynamic] load on the car, it’s disconnected the front and rear,” Horner said.
“I think on other [circuits] perhaps running more downforce hides some of the balance issues we have, and you can see that we have a disconnection in balance that just isn’t working.
“As soon as you end up in that situation, you’re harder on tyres, you end up compensating, you move the balance around, you secure one problem and create another, so you just end up in a vicious circle.”
It led Horner to the same conclusion as Verstappen.
“Based on [Sunday’s] performance, you’d say both [titles] are under absolute pressure,” he said. “We were the fourth-fastest car. That’s the reality.
“We’ve got to turn it around if we want to make sure we win both titles.”
Lando takes aim at Piastri’s overtake | 03:19
BUT HOW HAS IT HAPPENED SO QUICKLY?
It’s hard to believe that Red Bull Racing has spiralled from record-breaking championship winner last year to being regularly beaten in 2024.
Some have pointed to the departure of famed chief technical officer Adrian Newey as an obvious culprit.
Newey’s reputation precedes him. He wins titles wherever he goes — at Williams, McLaren and Red Bull Racing. But wherever he leaves inevitably loses — Williams hasn’t won another title since, and McLaren has claimed just one post-Newey drivers championship.
Now it looks like he turned off the victory tap as he swiped out of the Milton Keynes design office earlier this year too.
Could it really be as simple as that — that the removal of one brick has brought down the entire house?
The team says Newey’s exit is a coincidence.
“That is not true,” Helmut Marko wrote in the Red Bull owned Speedweek. “Newey was no longer involved in all the details of vehicle development in the spring.
“Of course this cannot be denied: Newey is Newey, a man with incredible experience, which has always distinguished him.
“But our problem lies elsewhere. The examples of Mercedes and, to a lesser extent, Ferrari have shown how difficult teams are when dealing with these wing cars.”
But Mercedes and Ferrari’s problems could be evidence for, rather than against, the Newey theory.
Both teams have won multiple races this year, suggesting both cars are fundamentally fast.
Similar to Red Bull Racing, however, both teams have struggled to develop their cars, periodically finding them unwieldy to set up and unpredictable to drive.
Newey’s magic dust is that he’s massively experienced beyond his role as chief technical officer. Modern F1 teams employ hundreds of specialist staff to design cars, but Newey hails from days when he’d have to do practically all of it himself.
He’s also been around long enough to remember F1’s previous ground effect era.
His ability to conceptualise the entire car — a rare talent that earnt him the only half-joking reputation as the man who can see airflow — imbued Red Bull Racing with a quiet advantage.
Newey set the development trend in this era and then managed to navigate RBR through the choppy waters of ongoing development while other teams foundered.
But that tremendous ability to troubleshoot the car’s problems has now walked out on the team. Now all the little fires he was so good at fighting have grown into an inferno.
It’s now in the same situation as everyone else, and suddenly it’s mired in the pack.
Ricciardo’s mechanic cost him 10-seconds | 00:40
VERSTAPPEN HAS BEEN PAPERING OVER THE CRACKS
Complacency also appears to have crept in — albeit not of the type that ordinarily afflicts teams at the top of the sport.
There’s no sign Red Bull Racing has rested on its laurels, but it’s certainly rested on Verstappen’s talents.
“I think [the core problems have] been there for some time,” Horner said, per ESPN. “I think actually really going through the data there were issues there at the beginning of the year in the characteristics.
“If you dig into it, there were some of these issues early in the year, even when we were winning races by 20 seconds.
“If you go back in the data, there was a few races last year where we started to see this — in Austin and so on — so I think it’s a characteristic that we know we have to address.
“Others have obviously made a step, and as we’ve pushed the package harder, it’s exposed the issue.”
Effectively what Horner is admitting is that Verstappen has been good enough to compensate for the car’s problems for almost the last 12 months, but now those issues are too great for even him to steer around.
Sergio Pérez — admirably using his team boss’s admission to explain away his long-running struggles — eagerly agreed that the car has been the problem all along.
“I really feel like I’m in the same boat as I’ve been in for the last eight, 10 races, but now all of a sudden Max has come into similar issues,” he said.
Asked if he took any heart from the fact the gap to Verstappen was somewhat smaller in Monza because the Dutchman was dealing with the same problems, the Mexican gamely said he’d have liked to have been beaten by a lot more.
“I wish that the gap was a lot bigger and that Max was winning, because at the end that would only help the team and in the constructors [championship] especially,” he said.
Pérez isn’t totally wrong, though. It’s long been clear his problems have stemmed from his inability to deal with a flighty, snappy car, the underlying assumption being that this was simply the gap between a good driver and the great Verstappen.
That’s still true, but now it seems Red Bull Racing’s confidence that Verstappen can deal with anything it threw at him is being tested too. Even he has his limits.
Piastri falls just short in Italian GP | 02:37
CAN IT CATCH BACK UP THIS YEAR?
To battle back from here will require Red Bull Racing to overcome some baked-in disadvantages.
The first and potentially most significant is its wind tunnel.
Increasingly outdated despite ad hoc updates, Horner admitted for the first time in Italy that the data it’s generating isn’t lining up to real-world results.
“Obviously when you have that it means you can’t trust your tools, so then you have to go back to track data and previous experience,” he said.
“I think that the wind tunnel has its limitations, which is why we’ve invested in a new tunnel, but it’s what we’ve got, and we have to make use of it.
“I think the wind tunnel is perhaps a contributor, but it’s not the reason behind where we are.”
It’s a potentially debilitating issue, leaving designers without the ability to validate upgrades before committing to spending some of the budget cap on building them.
There’s also the equalisation measures that are pegging Red Bull Racing to the fewest runs in its wind tunnel and the least amount of time using computer simulation.
Development handicap, 1 July to 31 December
1. Red Bull Racing: 100 per cent of wind tunnel and simulation time
2. Ferrari: 107 per cent
3. McLaren: 114 per cent
4. Mercedes: 121 per cent
5. Aston Martin: 129 per cent
6. RB: 136 per cent
7. Haas: 143 per cent
8. Alpine: 150 per cent
9. Williams: 157 per cent
10. Sauber: 164 per cent
While it would be wrong to say they’re to blame for the team ending up here, these limitations will certainly hinder the speed at which it can recover.
The team is also battling a brain drain. Its highest profile departure is Adrian Newey, but he’s only the latest of the founding management team to quit.
Former chief aero engineer Dan Fallows joined Aston Martin in 2022. Former chief designer Rob Marshall joined McLaren at the beginning of this year.
They followed former chief vehicle performance engineer Mark Ellis former chief aerodynamicist Peter Prodromou leaving for Mercedes and McLaren respectively since the team’s previous title-winning era.
McLaren CEO Zak Brown has said he’s been receiving an unusually high number of CVs from Red Bull Racing staff since the beginning of the year.
But all that said, the core of the team is strong and the car is fundamentally fast.
“I think the most important thing is understanding the issue,” Horner said. “And then I think there are certain fixes that potentially can be introduced.
“They will perhaps not resolve the whole issue, but address some of it.
“We’ve now got a two-week period before Baku and Singapore, and then we have another mini-break where we can work between Singapore and Austin. Time now is crucial.”
Red Bull Racing can’t solve all its systemic problems in that time frame, but it might be able to do enough to defend both championships.
But it’s a long way back to the top from here.