Verstappen exit ever likelier? Our verdict on Red Bull's F1 problems
Tue 23, Jul, 2024
Source: The Race
McLaren's team orders drama took a little focus off Red Bull and its star Formula 1 driver Max Verstappen's exceptionally grumpy Hungarian Grand Prix - but now what the dust has settled, it's McLaren that can move forward with some degree of comfort while Red Bull's big issues lie unresolved.
Is the RB20 bumping up against a worrying ceiling of performance - and has Verstappen been irritated enough, or even just concerned enough, to start envisioning a future away from Red Bull more seriously?
Our team offer their viewpoints.
Specifics of Verstappen's ire are important
Scott Mitchell-Malm
Verstappen frustration when things aren’t going well is nothing new. What felt so significant was the complaints about other individuals in the team.
It went beyond ‘I’m annoyed with this specific strategy’ or ‘I’m annoyed with this specific blunder’ that meant he lost a race. It targeted something bigger: whether the whole team is buying in to the level he expects.
Describing the situation as Verstappen did, he accused some unnamed team members of not recognising the severity of the threat to Red Bull. These mystery underachievers are not on the same “wavelength”, Verstappen said. He might be right – Red Bull says he isn’t, that everyone is working as hard as possible, but maybe not.
Maybe the recent success and the healthy 2024 championship leads have induced complacency, and some people in the team did start to think too early this year that it would be a walk in the park. Maybe Verstappen’s specific complaints about limitations in the car could and should have been heeded earlier.
It’s worth wondering if Verstappen is handling it as well as he could. He is intensely single-minded in the pursuit of success. It is what drives him to the level of a three-time world champion and what can make him a tense and potentially dispiriting team-mate when he is so critical.
Red Bull’s always said it knows Verstappen well enough, and he knows and trusts the team in return, that the relationship is built on solid foundations and benefits from such direct exchanges. This was something else though. Verstappen’s not questioned the team like this before.
It might be he realises he’s crossed a line and apologises to the team and all is well. If not, will anyone be in the scope? Will there be pressure to make changes in the design team, the race team, or Verstappen’s engineering crew? Is race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase – the only person who can speak to Verstappen as bluntly as he speaks to/about the team – going to come under fire?
Red Bull doesn’t need scapegoats right now. But Verstappen needs reassurance, and if he doesn’t get it, that’s the kind of thing that will drive him out of the team and towards Mercedes. Not his father bickering with his team boss, or anything like that.
Red Bull's ace in the hole is now a limitation
Ben Anderson
It’s becoming clearer that Red Bull’s biggest problem now is that ultra-stiff suspension that Adrian Newey had such a key hand in designing for the start of this ground-effect rules set.
Prioritising a super-stable aerodynamic platform that worked superbly at high speed and helped give the car incredible high-speed efficiency was exactly the right trade-off when Red Bull could afford to come up on ride height on bumpier/slower tracks and still have enough downforce and a decent-enough car balance (except in Singapore, maybe) for Verstappen to win almost every race comfortably.
But now the field has converged and it seems other teams - McLaren and Mercedes especially - have worked out a more comfortable performance trade-off.
Mercedes has always been happier at higher ride heights, but now has the ability to balance the front and rear of its car between high and low speeds, too.
McLaren seems to be close enough to Red Bull at high speeds, but better at low and medium speeds, thanks to a mechanical platform that is far more forgiving.
Perhaps the only edge Red Bull retains is its excellent ‘raceability’ - it appears to have less drag than the McLaren does and so Verstappen is more likely to pull off a marginal overtake than Lando Norris or Oscar Piastri is - as we saw with Verstappen versus George Russell in the first stint of the Spanish Grand Prix.
Red Bull obviously went for a bold upgrade strategy in Hungary to try to extract more performance on a track less than ideally suited to its car concept. Verstappen’s frustration with his team in Budapest suggests that experiment didn’t work.
Now is perhaps the time for Red Bull to seriously consider overhauling that mechanical platform to create a better all-around performance profile.
The counterargument is that RB20 has looked genuinely second-rate on only three occasions - Miami, Monaco and Hungary - so far this season - so perhaps it’s not the time for panic stations just yet.
But if Verstappen fails to win either of the next two races - his home grands prix at Spa or Zandvoort - you can bet the clamour for Red Bull to change course will reach fever pitch.
The maths has changed for 2025
Edd Straw
It wasn't long ago that it was reasonable to consider Red Bull leading the way in 2025 a given. And even if rivals caught up, the RB21 would still be plenty good enough to win the world championship.
It would be exaggerating to say the prognosis is now bad, but there are very obvious questions about whether one or more of Red Bull's rivals - McLaren in particular - might have a car concept that makes for more of an all-rounder.
That's significant because the notion Verstappen might force an exit to join Mercedes for next year once seemed absurd as it meant sacrificing the 2025 title. Now, it seems less clear-cut. Making such a move for '25 is still a remote possibility, but you can at least construct an argument for doing so.
This may not have changed Verstappen's perspective as he's been warning for some time that this could happen. But winning papers over a lot of cracks and the ratio between those two things at Red Bull has become much less favourable recently.
No easy out if this is personal
Glenn Freeman
What fascinates me about what's going on at Red Bull at the moment is trying to work out where this tension is really coming from.
Is it just a simple case of everybody getting short-tempered with each other because a previously dominant winning machine is now finding winning much more difficult to achieve? If so, perhaps it'll calm down, post-summer break, when everyone's had more time to come to terms with how quickly F1's competitive sands have shifted. Right now, it would be understandable for a team (and its lead driver) to be struggling to come to terms with the sudden fall from looking almost untouchable to feeling vulnerable every weekend.
But, could it actually be that the tension we've been hearing about behind the scenes at Red Bull for a while now is no longer being covered up by unprecedented levels of F1 success?
Perhaps the key players involved were able to put their differences to one side and stay roughly on the same page when doing so allowed everyone at Red Bull to enjoy victory after victory.
If that's the case, then unless Red Bull miraculously unlocks a load of performance in the second half of the season to re-establish its dominant position on track, I can't see this situation improving very quickly.
It's now less risky to leave
Josh Suttill
A bizarre statement to have written just a few months ago, but it's really starting to feel like Verstappen sticking with Red Bull into F1's new era would actually be riskier than walking away.
Red Bull no longer has F1's outright fastest car, it certainly doesn't have the strongest rate of development and every doubt there already was about its potency in 2026 remains or has been amplified.
You'd surely get longer odds on Verstappen sticking with Red Bull until his contract expires at the end of 2028 than him leaving before then.
And that's a big problem for Red Bull because come up with a contingency and you're simply making the thing you're making the contingency for just in case, more likely. It can't install a potential successor to Verstappen within the team as his team-mate like Carlos Sainz, without that hire itself increasing the chances of a Verstappen exit.
It's surely going to be difficult for Red Bull to avoid second-guessing Verstappen's faith in the team.
Red Bull needs to show progress now. But it also has to balance 'fixing' 2024 and 2025 while continuing to make 2026 as attractive as possible and less of a risk worth leaving Red Bull over.
No other frontrunning team has to worry about losing its star driver before 2026 and it just so happens Red Bull has the star driver every other team would bend over backwards to snatch away.
Is Red Bull heading where Mercedes used to be?
Rob Hansford
McLaren and Mercedes have shown the F1 development race might be more important than ever this season.
And so with a raft of new updates, Verstappen will no doubt have been expecting that his advantage over the rest of the field would be restored in Hungary.
Clearly, that didn't happen, and throughout the race Verstappen complained several times about the balance of his Red Bull. That likely fuelled his frustration, and will no doubt weigh heavily on his mind going forward.
We've become so accustomed to Red Bull bolting on new parts and finding several tenths worth of laptime almost immediately in the past. But that doesn't seem to be happening right now.
There are hints that it's starting to fall into a similar trap to where Mercedes had been, with Horner saying after the grand prix that the performance window for the car is quite peaky, meaning small. That's definitely not helpful, especially when you need your car to be performing well on a wide range of circuits.
Combine that along with the fact Newey is about to depart, and it could well get Verstappen wondering about where this leaves Red Bull and - more importantly - him going into the future.