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After two years of domination during which it could do no wrong, 2024 has turned into a bit of a nightmare for Red Bull.
By any standards, it’s still a very competitive team but Mercedes and especially McLaren have made big progress and the fight at the front on any given weekend is now a six- or, if Ferrari gets back in contention, eight-car battle.
Max Verstappen still knows how to win and drags results from a car others can only dream of, but he can’t do that every weekend.
At Zandvoort, Red Bull ran its two cars in different specifications. Verstappen raced an early-season floor package while Sergio Perez ran a later version.
No team wants to air its dirty laundry in public but, when a top team starts to do such obvious and extreme experiments, that reveals how confused its development direction is. We’ve seen this before from Mercedes, which - even having made significant progress - is still inconsistent.
Red Bull concluded that the floor Perez ran was the faster one, by around two tenths of a second. You could say that’s positive given it’s a newer specification and therefore should be quicker - however, it’s difficult to see just how Red Bull can make that assumption.
In the race, Perez’s fastest lap was a 1m14.587s on lap 69 of 72, while Verstappen's was a 1m14.752s on lap 30. If that's the two tenths being talked about - well, those fastest laps were 39 laps apart. At roughly 1.3kgs of fuel per lap that’s a 52kg difference in car weight, which equates to around 1.5s in laptime around Zandvoort.
The big question lies in Verstappen’s willingness to run the old, less performant floor while chasing a world championship. This, to me, shows how serious the situation is at Red Bull.
The above composite - Verstappen's car on the left, Perez's on the right - shows the upper surface of the leading edge of the floor.
I’m sure the modifications making that upper surface much more complicated and detailed have been made for a reason, which is likely a change to the unseen undersurface. The undersurface is what separates these cars in terms of ultimate performance and every team keeps details of the underfloor hidden, which is why it’s always bad news if you crash and your car gets craned.
When you go to this extent with the surface detail, you are asking the airflow to do something it really doesn’t want to do, which means it tends to follow its own path and before you know it you actually have less control over that airflow than you previously had.
This overcomplication on the upper surface could very easily have reduced the performance of that critical front corner flow extraction. If that happens, then the complete underfloor will suffer as far as performance is concerned.
Red Bull may be confident the new floor is faster, but I’d question how consistent it is given that if it does lack control of the airflow it could be prone to separation problems that cause inconsistent balance.
So how did it all get to this situation? It's been well-documented that there's been plenty of unrest here - with the politics inside the team, the much-publicised investigation into Christian Horner, and Jos Verstappen’s very public comments. There were reports Adrian Newey wasn’t happy, and rumours he might move on that were denied before it was proved there is no smoke without fire and his departure was announced at the start of May.
Red Bull in 2024
Before Newey's exit became official
Verstappen Q average - 1.0
Verstappen GP average - 1.0
Perez Q average - 3.0
Perez GP average - 2.8
After Newey's exit became official
Verstappen Q average - 2.3
Verstappen GP average - 2.9
Perez Q average - 10.1
Perez GP average - 6.4
DNFs excluded
Most teams would be delighted with the kind of results Red Bull has been getting even after the Newey news broke. But the trend is clearly in the wrong direction. And while Newey has remained in the Red Bull fold, attending the Monaco and British Grands Prix, it’s only natural his influence has waned.
The company line became that Red Bull has the depth in numbers to not miss him or his input - and that they had been working that way, with Newey only a peripheral presence, for quite a while. In other words, the implied company line was he was surplus to requirements and that his contribution wasn’t that significant anyway.
You can judge for yourself what you think of this situation. It is never just one person who is responsible for success or failure, but a designer with Newey’s all-round experience of designing and developing championship-winning cars, as well as recovering from difficult situations, will always be valuable.
To get the best out of them, it’s up to the team to give such a person the working environment that they require to thrive.
One of Newey’s many strengths is the ability to understand the way to extract performance from a car under any rules set and how to trade off the various design compromises involved. That clarity of vision is helped by being away from the day-to-day coalface, which I know from my own experience is an invaluable perspective.
Just having time to look at things from the outside as opposed to the daily firefighting is, for most people, the way to get the best out of them. Newey is no different.
People don’t just have good ideas because it’s the right time to have a good idea - ideas come to you because your mind never stops thinking about solutions to a set of given problems.
Nobody is playing that Newey role for the team now, so it’s no surprise Red Bull is struggling to find the right direction. And bolting parts on its lead car that work worse than new ones in an attempt to build its understanding can very quickly lead to even more confusion.
Perhaps it’s time for Red Bull to make that big offer to Newey to get him back into the fray?
