Ahead of the Monaco weekend, Max Verstappen made no secret of it: the Monaco weekend could prove to be very difficult for Red Bull, and the victory in Imola — on a track more suited to the RB21’s characteristics — shouldn’t have created false expectations. Curiously, the RB21 was actually slower in qualifying than the 2024 car, although it must be said that the struggle to generate grip from the C6 compound likely played a significant role.
It’s almost paradoxical that fourth place could be seen as a positive result for a driver still chasing the world championship dream, but that’s the reality: Red Bull simply wasn’t up to the level of the competition this weekend, starting with a mistake on Friday, despite a faint glimmer of hope spotted in FP3 on the medium tyre.
That glimmer faded in the afternoon due to the difficulty in finding the grip the RB21 needed. This pushed the team to take a gamble and try something different strategically, with Verstappen starting on the hard tyre in the hope of extending the stint and capitalizing on a favorable turn of events.
In reality, there was a brief moment when things could have changed: a fleeting chance to snatch the podium from Piastri, but the opportunity window was extremely narrow. During the first stint, Verstappen went longer than his rivals as planned: for just one lap, Max had around a 19.5-second advantage over the McLaren driver — a borderline delta to consider pitting and rejoining ahead.
However, it’s likely that two factors played a role at that moment: first, Verstappen didn’t have any more sets of hard tyres, only one set of mediums, so he was forced to use softs in one of the three stints. Secondly, Red Bull probably didn’t want to take the risk of making a stop that wouldn’t guarantee track position, which is why it made more sense to continue and hope for an opportunity.
This was confirmed by Christian Horner: “At the first stop, we got fairly close to Oscar at one point, but at best we would’ve been side by side. So we decided: let’s stay out. The advantage would have been that, in the case of a Safety Car or red flag, Max would have stayed in front.”
From the start, the strategy was in fact to extend the stint and hope not so much for a Safety Car, which wouldn’t have radically changed the course of the race, but rather for a red flag, which would have neutralized the event and allowed a tyre change without losing position, as permitted by the rules.
“When I heard it was like 45-50 seconds or something like that, yeah, there wasn’t much to do. You can pit, obviously, and then just drive around alone. Or you just hope something happens and it works out. It didn’t, but that’s okay. I wasn’t really too… I don’t know. My emotions were very neutral,” Verstappen said.
“I mean, even with a Safety Car, obviously, I still would’ve been fourth. It’s more of a red flag situation. Yeah, I mean, it’s okay. Even looking at the whole race, I don’t think we had the pace anyway. Compared to the top three cars, every time I tried to stay close, I think the tyres overheated too much. This just wasn’t our race.”
Considering how the weekend went, Verstappen still tries to look on the bright side, because fourth place is almost a way to limit the damage on one of Red Bull’s most difficult tracks, and he points out there is still work to do: “Considering our pace throughout the weekend, I think we did a good job. As a team, obviously we’re never happy with fourth. But we also have to accept it when we know the limits of our car,” the Dutchman added.
Leave a Reply