Red Bull seriously considered changing the setup of Max Verstappen’s RB22 and starting the British Grand Prix from the pit lane, but the team ultimately concluded that such a move would have brought fewer advantages than keeping the car unchanged. Here’s why.
“I’d rather start from the pit lane.” Max Verstappen summed up his frustration with the performance of the RB22 at the British Grand Prix in a short but crystal-clear statement.
The four-time world champion was held back in qualifying by a car that was far from ideally balanced, while also suffering from lower top speed than he had enjoyed during Saturday afternoon’s Sprint Race.
“It doesn’t make much sense because, if the conditions stay like this, I’ll have to drive the same way. At this point I’d rather make changes, even if the car isn’t unpredictable. The balance is still not right and we’re slow on the straights,” Max concluded.
At the end of Saturday’s running, Red Bull Racing held an internal meeting to decide what to do: should they follow Verstappen’s wishes, accept a pit lane start for Sunday’s race, or leave the car untouched and hope Max could once again work his magic and limit the damage?
The answer became clear on Sunday morning. Car number 3 remained exactly as it had been the previous day. That meant only one thing: Verstappen would line up on the starting grid with the same car that had caused him so many problems on Saturday.
Until Verstappen’s retirement just a few laps from the finish, Red Bull’s decision had actually proved to be the right one. Max was running third, beaten only by the two Ferraris, while also benefiting from the issue that slowed Andrea Kimi Antonelli during his fight for victory. He was still ahead of George Russell’s Mercedes, with the British driver struggling even more than he was.
The rear wing failure ultimately threw away what would have been an important result, not so much for morale as for the championship standings. Frustrated after the race, Verstappen once again stressed that the team should have listened to his requests.
Red Bull, however, has now explained why it chose not to follow Verstappen’s suggestion and instead continued with the existing setup. Team principal Laurent Mekies addressed the decision in detail.
“After qualifying it was obvious that, to put it mildly, we were not at all happy with the balance of the car. Changing the car’s setup would simply have meant starting from the pit lane.”
“Even though we knew racing with a far-from-ideal balance would not be enjoyable, we still believed it would produce a better result than starting from the pit lane with a car that might have been slightly better. We discussed it with Max. I completely accept that he may have a different perception—he’s the one driving the car, so that’s understandable.”
Red Bull did evaluate the possibility of a pit lane start with a revised setup but ultimately concluded it was not the better option. Verstappen would have had to start from the back of the field and, while he likely would still have fought his way into the points, beginning from the grid offered several key advantages.
First, it would allow him to spend less of the race in dirty air, with fewer cars ahead, helping to reduce tyre overheating. It also gave the team greater strategic flexibility and placed less stress on the car itself throughout the race.
“At the end of the day, though, we learned some important lessons. As Max pointed out, the car probably behaved very similarly to how it did yesterday, so we encountered the same limitations that we already knew about,” the French team principal continued.
“I’m not entirely convinced that, had we started from the pit lane, we would still have managed to reach third place on track before the failure occurred.” Looking back, that is perhaps the strongest argument in support of the team’s decision.
What ultimately ruined everything was a second failure involving the adjustable rear wing—reportedly linked to a possible actuator issue—following the first problem seen in Austria. Although the two failures had different root causes, they produced the same outcome: Verstappen’s retirement and, as a consequence, increased tension between the team and its star driver, greater than anyone would reasonably have expected.
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