Despite Max Verstappen’s second-place finish in Singapore, Red Bull hasn’t had an easy second half of the championship, with many experiments happening behind the scenes in a bid to regain competitiveness. In fact, although the final result is what matters, without Ferrari’s issues and Oscar Piastri’s mistakes on Saturday, securing a podium would not have been particularly easy.
Problems have actually been ongoing for some time, so much so that in the Netherlands, the three-time world champion decided to take a step back with the car’s floor, opting for the unit installed at the start of the season but with some more recent elements. This attempt stemmed from discussions during the summer break in an effort to regain the balance lost after the first few races.
However, according to Team Principal Christian Horner, the lowest point of the season for Red Bull came just a week later when the Circus moved to Italy for the Monza round. In that event, the RB20 was only the fourth-best car, though competing with Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes wouldn’t have been entirely impossible, but strategy and power unit problems slowed Verstappen down, forcing him to settle for sixth place.
However, it wasn’t so much the final result of that Grand Prix that weighed heavily but rather the overall behavior of the car, to the point that, by the end of the weekend, Verstappen himself referred to his RB20 as a “monster” due to the difficulties in driving it. Yet, the Italian race proved to be a useful data collection exercise, as Red Bull continued to experiment with the car’s floor on both vehicles, bringing to light some of the project’s flaws.
Looking back at the telemetry data from that weekend, it’s clear that the RB20 was limited in terms of balance both in qualifying and during the race. Despite a more downforce-heavy rear wing compared to rivals, which negatively impacted straight-line speed (a compromise the Milton Keynes team tried to mitigate by trimming just the DRS flap), the car was often unpredictable, even in high-speed corners—traditionally one of the Anglo-Austrian car’s strengths.
Only in the two Lesmo corners was the RB20 able to keep pace with the McLarens, while in other high-speed sections, such as Ascari and Parabolica, it showed more signs of struggle. The last corner might be the most telling, as in the past it was an area where Verstappen could make a difference by pushing hard on entry and finding good support mid-corner. This year, however, he couldn’t find the right confidence with the car, particularly during cornering.
“We had already identified the issues, but I believe Monza perhaps highlighted part of the root cause or helped identify the main cause of our struggles. So, I consider Monza to be the lowest point, and we are starting to rebuild from there,” explained the Red Bull Team Principal.
When aerodynamic load was reduced to adapt the car to Monza’s high speeds, the issues with poor balance between the front and rear became even more evident: “Max has this ability and the possibility to drive a car that is sensitive like this, to drive around the issues. But actually, when we took load off the car at Monza, the imbalance between the front and rear axles became apparent, and the numbers we expected to see on the track were very far from those in our simulations,” said Christian Horner.
During Saturday at Monza, there was a meeting with all the top management to outline what the problems with this car were, which the drivers had already been complaining about for some time, setting the groundwork for the upcoming races.
This process had already started during the summer break, but it takes time to bring corrections: in Baku, a revised floor was introduced, and Red Bull began working on the balance, with Perez fighting for the podium for a long time, while Verstappen drastically changed the setup on Saturday but went in the wrong direction. This is why the Milton Keynes team hopes that the updates in Austin will bring new life to Verstappen’s championship fight and not turn the last six races into a defensive battle without the tools to counterattack.
“Obviously, the gap to Lando in Singapore was significant in the first part of the race, and now we have the break to work hard and try to improve the car’s performance for Austin,” said Horner.
“If we consider where we were a few weeks ago, I believe we’ve made real progress. We have a development direction, and we’ve understood some of the car’s problems. I think we’re starting to solve them. We did better in Baku and better in Singapore. So, there will be many sleepless nights in Milton Keynes. McLaren is the benchmark car at the moment, and we need to catch up a bit, but we have the people and the skills to do so.”
The new components are now in production, but the time required to move them through the design and production cycle means that the Milton Keynes factory will be working at full capacity to try to incorporate its latest solutions onto the car for the challenging triple-header in Austin, Mexico, and Brazil.
“There’s a lot of information coming from these events that will influence the car in Austin. We’ve gathered a lot of useful data from the last two races, but they are very different circuits compared to Austin’s and Mexico’s corners. Brazil is different as well, so it will be interesting. Everyone on the team is extremely motivated,” Christian Horner added.
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