Red Bull and Verstappen leave the weekend in China with more uncertainties than certainties. Yesterday’s race, heavily influenced by the behavior of the Pirelli tires, confirmed that the RB21 is not at the level of the front-runners. Any analysis is clearly based on the performance of car number 1, as even in the 300-kilometer race, Liam Lawson struggled at the back of the pack.
There was no sign of competitiveness from the young New Zealand driver, who finished fifteenth and, more importantly, over a minute behind his teammate. It is now evident that racing with only one competitive driver is a huge handicap, nullifying any possibility of planning race strategies that could also rely on the second driver’s contribution.
After the second race of the championship, Jos’s son is still in second place in the drivers’ standings, trailing leader Lando Norris by “only” eight points. Essentially, the four-time F1 world champion has lost just a single point to the top of the standings in a weekend where Red Bull showed no flashes of competitiveness. Could it be that despite limiting the damage, there is nothing positive to take away?
A race of two halves
Verstappen’s first stint on medium tires was a nightmare. After losing two positions at the start to the Ferrari duo, the Dutch driver could not match the pace of the five cars ahead of him, forcing him into a waiting game in hopes of improving his pace on the hard tires, which no team had tested over the weekend.
In the early part of the race, the Hasselt-born champion had to limit the damage right from the start: “I had no grip. I wanted to go on the outside. And I kept oversteering. So I couldn’t lean on that tire. Then, of course, I didn’t want to take too many risks with the front wing or anything else. And actually, I think that was the right choice because, given how I drove in the first stint, they would have overtaken me anyway.”
“This way, I also stayed out of trouble,” admitted the Dutchman, who essentially drove in no man’s land during the first stint. Once he switched to hard tires, car number 1’s pace improved significantly. In the early laps on hards, Max Verstappen had to regain positions against those on different strategies—drivers who had started the race on hard tires.
Gradually, his gap to Lewis Hamilton shrank, prompting the Ferrari pit wall to call the seven-time champion in for a second stop. A decision that can be debated, but one that helped the Dutch ace gain a position without an on-track fight and begin his climb back to his starting position, ultimately closing in on Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari and overtaking him.
Damage limited, but more is needed to dream
In the final third of the race, Max Verstappen was among the fastest on track, managing to pass the Monegasque Ferrari driver with a well-executed move at the corkscrew turn just a few laps from the finish. The pace he displayed in the latter part of the race is perhaps the best takeaway for the Milton Keynes team from the first sprint weekend of the season.
However, it is far from enough to dream of success, at least in the short term. When some pointed out his strong performance in the final phase of the Grand Prix, Max Verstappen sarcastically remarked that the race would have needed to last at least six hours for him to trouble his rivals. Before the race, the Dutch driver was already aware that fourth place was likely the best possible result:
“After the start, considering how the first stint went, I told myself: well, this is the best we can do today. Fortunately, the hard tires helped us a bit more,” Max concluded. For now, Max Verstappen has scraped the bottom of the barrel. Now it is up to the team to provide him with a car capable of fueling his ambitions and challenging McLaren, who, after winning in Australia, secured a one-two finish, establishing themselves as the technical benchmark of the category.
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