Max Verstappen got out of his RB19 at the 2023 Italian Grand Prix and held his hands up to signal a record-breaking 10th straight victory. A year later at the same circuit, it was a completely different story. Something's gone wrong for Red Bull and its champion, who fumed at the team on his radio and pushed his winless streak to six races.
Few expected Red Bull's downfall to come as swiftly as it did. The team is one of the most well-oiled machines in Formula 1 history, and 2024 seemed to have picked off right where 2023 left off. Verstappen won four of the first five races, with Red Bull scoring a one-two finish in three of them.
And then the wheels fell off.
The Miami Grand Prix initially seemed to be business as usual. Verstappen took the sprint race and started on pole. But he didn't win on Sunday. None of the typical big three did; not Red Bull, not Ferrari, and not Mercedes. Instead, McLaren's Lando Norris earned his first-ever win and the team's first triumph since 2021. The entire grid was overjoyed for Norris' inaugural victory, perhaps no one more than Verstappen. And why wouldn't he be? It was easy to consider Miami a one-off. The Dutch driver hit a bollard and the safety car picked up Norris at an opportune time. But those at Red Bull didn't know then that the papaya-colored team was about to pull the rug from under them.
Under team principal Andrea Stella's leadership, McLaren reversed an unprecedented deficit to Red Bull in the cost-cap era. CEO Zak Brown told theScore in June that his team was knocking on the door but, a mere few months later, McLaren's completely kicked it in. That was especially evident at the recent race in Monza, a low-drag circuit that had traditionally favored its rival.
McLaren turned a 0.899s disadvantage per lap into a 0.582s advantage at The Temple of Speed, gaining roughly 1.4 seconds per lap over one year. How did Stella's team do that considering Verstappen finished 48 seconds ahead of Norris at the season opener in Bahrain? And how did Red Bull squander its upper hand?
While Red Bull's dominance seems to have evaporated quickly, the signs of its supremacy fading have been evident for a while. A progress report on the season reveals that McLaren bridged the gap in Miami, Austria, and Zandvoort - all circuits where Stella's group brought spectacularly effective performance upgrades.
Red Bull's Brain Drain
While McLaren can take some of the credit for ending Red Bull's stranglehold over Formula 1, the truth is that every empire crumbles from within to a certain degree. Red Bull is no different. Team principal Christian Horner was investigated and then cleared of allegations of misconduct against a female employee by Red Bull's parent company. Verstappen hinted at leaving the team if senior advisor Helmut Marko was ousted. Surprisingly, this period brought Red Bull its biggest on-track success this season, though the base in Milton Keynes didn't go completely unscathed.
The shocking loss of legendary engineer Adrian Newey was the next domino to fall, and many have speculated that his absence goes hand-in-hand with Red Bull's decline. After all, Newey's been away from F1 duties since announcing his departure on May 1 - right before the Miami Grand Prix, which is where the decline initially started for Verstappen and teammate Sergio Perez.
But correlation doesn't always imply causation. Holes left by Newey and Rob Marshall, who departed after 17 years in 2023 to join McLaren as its chief designer, have a negative impact. However, it's unlikely that the departure of one figure - even Newey, who's so gifted in aerodynamics that he can see air - could turn everything upside down immediately. Besides, development paths for the RB20 were almost certainly laid out while Newey was around. That suggests another top culprit.
The RB20's Predicament
Somewhere along the way, Red Bull made a few wrong turns in developing the RB20. What was once a record-breaking car has turned into a "monster," according to Verstappen. The RB20 still has problems with bumps and curbs like the RB19 did, but it's been stripped of all the redeeming characteristics of its dominant predecessor: it munches tires, its performance window is extremely peaky, and the balance shifts from understeer back to oversteer corner by corner depending on track temperature, among other factors.
In Zandvoort, Norris scored the most commanding win of the season, a 22.896-second conquest over Verstappen. The situation became so dire at Red Bull, meanwhile, that it fitted the Bahrain-spec floor on Verstappen's car for the race, essentially chalking the weekend and using it as a testing session. The data returned wasn't easy to swallow. Horner disclosed after the subsequent race in Monza that the numbers revealed issues were present under the surface to begin the 2024 campaign and even in spurts at the end of last season. His most concerning declaration, though, was that correlation demons with upgrades have only made the RB20 more unpredictable.
"Recent upgrades, whilst they've put load on the car, it's disconnected front and rear. We can see that, our wind tunnel doesn't say that, but the track says that," Horner said, according to Adam Cooper. "So it's getting on top of that, because obviously, when you have that, it means you can't trust your tools."
Red Bull brought performance packages to Suzuka, Imola, Silverstone, and Hungary. It's impossible to say which upgrade angered the RB20, but Verstappen and Perez first appeared uncomfortable at Imola, and the duo's results worsened with every subsequent upgrade package. The only difference was that Verstappen could cope with the erratic behaviour initially - even scoring a few wins - while Perez struggled right from the get-go. Now the hole is far too deep for even a pilot as capable as Verstappen to compensate for.
Verstappen
Perez
Verstappen's talent may have left Red Bull too slow or naive to the underlying concerns with the RB20 until it was too late. If the car was still nearing the theoretical lap times due to its pilot's ability, the team might have believed they were still on the right path. It wouldn't be the first time: In 2022, technical director Pierre Wache said that Verstappen's ability "blinded" the team to troubles with the 2020 car.
Correlation, Cost Cap, and a Ceiling?
Red Bull's correlation issues are also not uncommon in this regulation set. While adding more downforce or load in the wind tunnel typically should hypothetically better lap times, it doesn't always correlate on track. Just ask Mercedes or Ferrari, who have both dealt with headaches in the ground-effect era. This generation's cars are temperamental, and it doesn't help that Red Bull has consistently had the least wind tunnel time and CFD work allocated due to its first-place standing in the constructors' championship.
McLaren, aided by an immense technical team and a new wind tunnel, made gargantuan gains - like the regulations intended. Whether due to internal infighting, the cost cap, or both, Red Bull has suffered from a brain drain of sorts with a few key figures gone or on the way out. And, either the RB20 has hit its ceiling - just like the restrictive regulations intended - or the team has been duped by severe correlation problems, with every update causing more pain.
Red Bull team members told us repeatedly in 2023 that they didn't expect to dominate. In the buildup to 2024, they began talking about diminishing aerodynamic gains. Now, Verstappen's clinging to a 62-point lead in the drivers' championship and McLaren's a mere eight points away from leading the constructors' championship. Maybe we should've believed them.
