Red Bull’s second driver crisis: just 9 points in 11 races! Without Max Verstappen, it’s the weakest team. Red Bull’s second drivers have struggled to score points.

The Two-Faced Red Bull
There is a Red Bull with Max Verstappen and a Red Bull without its star driver. We can see this from the timing screens every race weekend and almost every session. The Milton Keynes car shows competitiveness only when driven by the reigning world champion, while the second drivers consistently fall into mediocrity.

After Sergio Perez and Liam Lawson, Yuki Tsunoda also found a tough challenge in Suzuka: the Japanese driver was eliminated in Q2 in his home GP and finished a mediocre 12th on Sunday, which was only a small improvement over Lawson’s performances.

The Numbers
More generally, Red Bull’s second driver hasn’t scored points since November 23, 2024, when Sergio Perez finished 10th in Las Vegas. Expanding the analysis to the last ten races, the picture for Red Bull becomes dramatic. If we were to split the Milton Keynes team into Verstappen and the “second drivers,” the latter would form the worst team on the grid.

Max Verstappen, alone, is the fourth “team” with the most points, while the last nine points from Sergio Perez represent the meager total Red Bull has accumulated since Baku, excluding Super Max. This situation closely resembles what Honda experienced with Marc Marquez, until 2023 the only one capable of putting the Japanese bike in top positions while his teammates struggled in the back rows.