Max Verstappen said it’s difficult to figure out where things have gone wrong for Red Bull through the middle section of this year’s championship.
With seven wins from the first 10 races of the season, Red Bull’s 2024 looked broadly like a continuation of last year’s domination, only for the RB20’s competitiveness to fall away over the six races held since.
Max Verstappen: RB20 performance means it’s out of my hands
Since his win in June’s Spanish Grand Prix, Verstappen has been winless for six consecutive race weekends – the longest streak without a victory for the Dutch driver since 2020.
Worse, the situation appears to be escalating, with Red Bull nowhere near the fight for victory at Monza last time out, following on from a drubbing at the hands of McLaren’s Lando Norris at Zandvoort.
It’s a difficult situation for the reigning F1 World Champions, with team boss Christian Horner admitting that the data from the team’s wind tunnel and CFD does not match the real-world behaviour of the car, meaning the developments introduced to the car are not helping unlock a better feel for the drivers.
Reverting to previous specifications of components may improve the balance for Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez but, with all the teams introducing upgrades through F1 2024, older specifications mean slower lap times, even if the car feels better to drive.
There’s no obvious way out of the situation at present, with Red Bull struggling to understand its balance issues and, worse, McLaren have closed the lead in the Constructors’ Championship down to just eight points with eight race weekends left – Verstappen’s lead over Lando Norris stands at 62 points.
Speaking at Monza, Verstappen said he believes the fate of this year’s championship is no longer in his hands as the performance of the RB20 has made it too difficult for him to win it through his own performances.
“Listen, I just do the best I can. If I win it or not, it’s not going to change my life,” he said, as he chases his fourth consecutive title
“Would I like to win it? Yes, of course. But it’s not in my hands with the performance of the car, because I just try to do the best I can, try to give feedback, try to make it faster – if that’s going to be enough to the end of the year, I don’t know, but I do know that we’re going to give it everything we have as a team to try and be more competitive than what we’ve shown and just go from there.”
Given that his winning the title would now seemingly come down to him massaging home his lead while title rival Lando Norris does his best to close the gap via wins and podiums, Verstappen said he hadn’t been expecting his year of defending the title to play out like this, even if he is “enjoying it”.
“Would I like to win more? Yes, of course,” he said.
“But I also knew that a season like we had last year is very unrealistic, but did I expect it to be like this? Not really with, of course, how we ended and how we started. So now it’s up to us to just try and make it better. But I know that everyone is working flat out to make it better.
“I mean, we know the balance problems, yeah, but now it’s up to us to try and make the car better to drive and more competitive.
“I think we are understanding where we need to find stuff. What we see in the wind tunnel, what we see from CFD, that is not the problem.”
Given that Red Bull found itself embroiled in off-track dramas at the start of the season, does Verstappen believe those distractions have played a part in the team falling away from its performance edge?
“I don’t know. I mean, it’s very hard to understand where things have gone wrong,” he said, before stating that his current 62-point lead, while a reasonable gap, isn’t enough to feel comfortable with yet – even if Norris does have to dig deep to close him down fast enough.
“You can’t calculate it like that,” he said.
“I mean, I would like to win races otherwise, you know, it’s still eight races and some sprint races.
“So these kind of things can easily be, of course, overturned. But I also know that you need to have a perfect end to the season, and that, I think, is very hard.
“I just try to do the best I can and try to find the best possible setup with the car. It’s been very difficult to get to that because we are a bit limited what we can do with the car.
“But, of course, I would like to win the championship. We still have a great lead. But you can’t just go into a weekend like, ‘Oh no, we cannot touch the car, because then maybe we lose more points’, or whatever. You go for it. You want to have the best possible package every single weekend.”
Discussion about this post