Pessimism for Red Bull despite RB20 upgrades in Austin: “They won’t be more competitive than McLaren”. Christijan Albers does not believe that Red Bull will match McLaren's competitiveness.

Austin is a crossroads for the championship
With the 2024 Formula 1 constructors’ championship seemingly out of reach, Red Bull is going all in to at least defend the drivers’ title, with Max Verstappen still ahead by 52 points over Lando Norris, with six races and three sprints left to contest.

In this context, the Austin race, which will see the return of the new format introduced this year, will be a crucial turning point for the title, as McLaren has consistently established itself as the absolute performance benchmark for months, with the MCL-38 appearing to have no weaknesses.

Conversely, the RB20, after dominating the early part of the season, has lost its way technically, allowing Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri to gain significant ground over the weekends.

After a streak of negative results, Max Verstappen showed important signs of recovery in Singapore last weekend, achieving an unexpected front-row start and finishing solidly in second place, albeit over 20 seconds behind his championship rival.

According to recent reports, Red Bull is also planning to introduce another update package in Texas, aiming to take the car to the next evolutionary step in the right direction.

“We’ve understood our problems and are on the right track to solve them,” Christian Horner commented after the race in Singapore. “The modifications in Austin will depend essentially on how much the engineers can extract from the data.”

However, Christijan Albers believes the Milton Keynes team will not match the competitiveness of the MCL-38 despite the upgrades: “Is it enough to bring an update to gain a second in long runs, or even half a second?” the former Dutch driver began in a recent interview for De Telegraaf: “McLaren has everything under control. Red Bull has less time in the wind tunnel and a smaller budget because Perez has had some setbacks, and all of this costs money; it’s not easy. I don’t think they will be more competitive than McLaren with the upgrades, but I do believe they will become more competitive again because we’ll be on circuits with medium- to high-speed corners. There, Red Bull will truly be much stronger than Ferrari and Mercedes. If they can catch up, it will mainly depend on the nature of the circuit.” – he concluded.