ZANDVOORT, Netherlands — Red Bull’s motorsport advisor Helmut Marko can always be trusted to tell it like it is, and after Sunday’s Dutch Grand Prix in Zandvoort, it was no different.
“We’re clearly being beaten and that’s alarming,” he told Austria’s Servus TV.
The statement followed one of Red Bull’s biggest losing margins since the introduction of Formula One’s current regulation set in 2022, with Max Verstappen crossing the finish line 22.869 seconds behind race winner Lando Norris.
Despite snatching the lead of the race at the first corner, Verstappen was powerless to stop his closest title rival passing him on lap 18 and disappearing into the distance. It was the type of victory only Verstappen himself has been able to inflict on rivals in recent years, and the explicit manifestation of a trend that was already building for several races before the summer break.
There is now no doubt that McLaren has a better all-round car than Red Bull, but it is the speed with which it has overhauled the world champions that is most surprising. At the season opener in March, Norris was 48 seconds adrift of race winner Verstappen, meaning, as a snapshot, Zandvoort represented a 70-second swing over a race distance in just five months.
Such a dramatic turnaround in such a short space of time is rare in Formula One and, as Marko said, undoubtedly “alarming” when you are on the receiving end. Is Red Bull really in trouble, though, or was the Zandvoort trouncing purely the result of a tough weekend in difficult conditions at an unusual circuit?
Winning margins are influenced by many factors and their size ultimately makes no difference to the points handed out, with Verstappen still reaping a healthy 18 points from his home race.
Of course, the core reason for Red Bull’s alarm is whether it has enough performance in reserve to ensure Verstappen’s 70-point lead isn’t whittled away over the final nine races of the season. Even a handful of races ago such a prospect seemed highly improbable, but if the current trend continues, Red Bull’s alarm bells will only ring louder.
What went wrong for Red Bull in Zandvoort?
Speaking after Sunday’s race, Verstappen said he had been struggling to find a “connected balance” in his car, referring to the Red Bull’s reluctance to turn into corners and propensity to snap into oversteer in corner exits.
“The whole weekend has been the same,” he explained. “I had pretty much the same balance from FP1 all the way to the race. I mean, the limitations are the same.
“It’s just very hard to solve at the moment. Something has been going wrong lately with the car that we need to understand and we need to, of course, quickly try to improve.”
A series of upgrades to the RB20 at Imola, in Spain and again in Hungary failed to counter the significant step in performance made by McLaren’s major upgrade at the Miami Grand Prix in May, while Red Bull has looked increasingly lost in its development direction. In Zandvoort, the team rolled back the specification of the floor on Verstappen’s car to a much earlier iteration in the hope of better understanding some of its issues and perhaps rediscovering the more pliable balance the Dutch driver enjoyed at the start of the season.
Had there been three dry, full-length practice sessions, Red Bull may have found a better setup to suit the return to the old floor, but with rain, wind and a long red flag period in FP3 curtailing useful running, Verstappen was never comfortable with his car. Clearly unhappy with the balance during the 72-lap grand prix, he was not convinced the old floor held any more answers than the new one.
“Something in the car has made it more difficult to drive,” he said. “It’s very hard to pinpoint where that is coming from at the moment. And yeah, that is then hurting, of course, our one-lap performance, but also our long run.”
Despite the lack of answers during the race weekend in Zandvoort, team principal Christian Horner is hopeful that a comparison between the data from Verstappen’s car and that of Sergio Pérez, which was running the latest floor, will provide a longer-term solution for Red Bull’s engineers.
“This weekend, we’ve run the cars in different specifications, and I think that has actually given us quite a lot of valuable info,” Horner said. “I think the drivers’ feedback has been very positive into that as well, in terms of what they’re feeling from the different setups. It hopefully now gives a real direction for the engineering group.
“I think it was clear that Checo’s race performance and race package got the better of the two, but we’ve got obviously 72 laps of data and a lot across two different compounds of tires now to compare that info.”
Red Bull also ran a large rear wing on Verstappen’s car to load it with downforce and help protect the tyres. As it turned out, tyre degradation was not a defining factor in the race, and the extra drag on the pit straight caused by the larger wing meant Verstappen was powerless to defend when Norris caught and passed him on lap 18.
“We took a little bit of a gamble, because we thought the degradation was going to be quite high, and so we went quite a lot on the downforce level to maximum downforce,” Horner said. “That was a little bit of a gamble, in that if the deg had been higher, we felt it would have helped with the deg. As it turned out, the deg was low, very low, and it just made us slow on the straight line with Max.
“So he did the hard part at the start and made a great start, led obviously into the first corner, was able to break the [drag reduction system], but pretty early on you could see Lando was very comfortable behind him. And then obviously passed him pretty easily with a straight-line deficit that we had, and the speed that he had.”
All in, the Dutch Grand Prix was a messy one for Red Bull, in which the team uncharacteristically failed to get the best from the car. Meanwhile, Norris was delighted with the performance of his McLaren, which featured another decent step in performance thanks to further upgrades.
Is Verstappen’s championship lead under threat?
If you were to copy and paste Norris’ dominance in Zandvoort (including his point for fastest lap) over the remaining nine races, the McLaren driver would win the title. Even within the space of the next three races, though, the relative performance of the McLaren and Red Bull is likely to fluctuate significantly.
Zandvoort was a track that suited McLaren. Like the Hungaroring, where McLaren took a one-two victory, it requires a high-downforce setup, which is a specification in which the MCL38 seems most comfortable.
The next two circuits in Monza and Baku reward low-downforce setups, with skinny rear wings to minimise drag on long straights. That could provide an opportunity for Verstappen, who won on the last truly low-downforce circuit in Montreal, but other factors about the next two circuits provide no guarantees.
Kerb riding, which is a major factor in negotiating Monza’s low-speed chicanes, was a weakness of the Red Bull at rounds earlier this season and one that the team was not sure it would be able to fix. A related issue with the car’s ride on bumpy surfaces could also provide a spanner in the works in Baku and the following race in Singapore, which was the only one Red Bull failed to win during its record-breaking season of dominance in 2023.
What’s more, the relative performances of Mercedes and Ferrari is also likely to be a factor at upcoming races and will almost certainly see the likes of Lewis Hamilton, George Russell, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz become factors at some point in the final nine races.
“Things can move very quickly,” Horner said. “We were winning races by 20, 25 seconds, and Stefano [Domenicali, F1 CEO] was asking us to slow down in the first five races. And then it can change very quickly, and that means it can change back the other way as well.
“We know we’ve got an issue, you can hear that Max, certainly today, he didn’t feel the car was responding to what he wanted. I think we’ve obviously got to be able to manifest that into a setup that works these tires across all conditions.
“McLaren did that with Lando today. We weren’t able to, but we limited the damage — if you can’t win it, finish second.
“They definitely have the fastest car at the moment. We have to respond to that.
“It’s not rocket science, there’s no silver bullets in this business, it’s a matter of understanding the problem, addressing the problem and then implementing fixes to it.”
At the centre of it all, Verstappen seems the most relaxed about the situation. If there are alarm bells ringing at Red Bull’s factory in Milton Keynes, it’s unlikely to change his approach, which, it should be remembered, has seen him outscore Norris at 11 of the 15 rounds this season.
“I think this weekend was just a bad weekend in general,” Verstappen said. “So we need to understand that, but the last few races already, they haven’t really been fantastic. So that, I think in a sense, was already a bit alarming.
“But we know that we don’t need to panic. We are just trying to improve the situation and that’s what we are working on.”
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