Turbulence and turmoil, infighting and instability, the past 12 months have been trying for Red Bull to the extent it was a wonder that Max Verstappen stood in the eye of the storm and calmly dragged a recalcitrant car to his fourth Formula One title. A fifth this year already looks to be a tall order as the team swing from a period of undisputed dominance to being left impotent by a car they cannot tame and in no little disarray, so much so that Verstappen may be considering his options.
In Japan, all eyes have been on the home hero Yuki Tsunoda, promoted to Red Bull from the sister team, Racing Bulls, with indecent haste, after Liam Lawson was sent packing the other way after two races. Even by F1 standards it was a brutal decision but indicative of the disorder that embroils Red Bull.
The fans here could not be happier, with their man in one of the top cars engendering a febrile atmosphere. Those who had fashioned elaborately tailored Yuki tribute costumes in the Racing Bulls livery had barely a week to upgrade it all to match the Red Bull colours but they managed it, the heaving fan areas in the shadow of the ferris wheel bustling with celebratory Yuki attire.
This was a positive at least after another week when Red Bull were left looking almost rudderless. The former driver Giedo van der Garde described the Lawson sacking as a “panic move” in an Instagram post that was pointedly liked by Verstappen and which the Dutchman confirmed in Suzuka included sentiments with which he concurred.
Christian Horner, the Red Bull principal, said his engineers had been concerned about Lawsons’s ability to cope, while Helmut Marko, the team’s motorsport adviser responsible for their young drivers programme, came out last week to justify the decision. His arguments lacked cohesion and felt more like retroactively attempting to account for it, but one thing he said was impossible to ignore. “We have this huge motivation to achieve this fifth title,” he said. “We also know that if we don’t deliver for Max, all the top drivers have performances clauses in their contract.”
Other teams, not least Mercedes and Aston Martin, are more than aware of this and have been circling Verstappen for some time. The performance clause means Red Bull need to produce a strong car for Verstappen and they have not.
From winning 21 of 22 races in 2023 a victory at this point would be very welcome and Verstappen’s remarkable securing of pole for Sunday’s Grand Prix serves only to further underline the Dutchman’s talent. Still, it is hard not to draw comparisons with the similarly perplexing decline at Manchester City. At Milton Keynes, as at the Etihad Stadium, this is not the time for panic.
The Lawson decision, was not an isolated event, but rather the latest in what has been almost relentless tumult. Before the season began last year there was the furore around Horner being investigated for alleged inappropriate behaviour after a complaint made by a female employee of the team, charges he strongly rejected. Horner was exonerated by an independent inquiry but it exposed frailties at the heart of the organisation.
There was an internal power struggle between Horner and the team’s parent company, Red Bull GMBH, and between Horner and Verstappen’s father, the former F1 driver Jos, who was openly calling for him to be sacked. Marko was under threat of suspension, prompting Verstappen in turn to threaten to leave. It was a power struggle worthy of the machinations of the Roman senate but not quite as bloody.
Even as they rode out the storm the team have since been battered on many levels. They have played it down but senior key figures leaving are serious blows. The first was the departure of Rob Marshall as chief engineering officer at the end of 2023 to become chief designer at McLaren. He was followed in 2024 by Adrian Newey, the team’s genius designer, joining Aston Martin and then Jonathan Wheatley, the sporting director, moving to Sauber and Will Courtenay, the head of strategy, also leaving for McLaren though being held to see out his contract by Red Bull for this year.
Through it all Verstappen has remained stoic, focused on the job in hand and the world champion eased through the opening part of last season when the car looked every bit as dominant as it had for the previous two years. But six races in, at the Miami GP, the wheels came off. McLaren brought upgrades that moved them to the front, while every development Red Bull applied to try to keep pace only set them back, to the extent Verstappen declared the car undriveable.
There was no quick fix and none in the longer term; the anticipated step up over the winter has not been produced. Meanwhile, McLaren and Mercedes have moved forward as Red Bull have made the car all but unmanageable.
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Verstappen’s prodigious talent may well have been masking fundamental problems the team have failed to address. The design philosophy for the regulation change of 2022 was rightly focused around having the car suit Verstappen and the extremely pointy front-end he prefers. For two years their performance advantage over the opposition, in Verstappen’s hands at least, was such that all was well, but when the other teams began catching up and Red Bull had to develop, the negative traits of the car and its increasingly narrow performance window only became more and more severe.
The pursuit of extreme performance at the expense of driveability was based on Verstappen’s capability to manage a demanding ride. Now it has reached the point where even Verstappen is barely managing, despite his performance in qualifying at Suzuka.
Newey has said he had identified problems in the car toward the end of 2023 and that as 2024 went on they became more acute. “It’s something I was starting to become concerned about,” he says. “But not many other people in the organisation seemed to be very concerned about it.”
He was right but the team, now under the technical director, Pierre Waché, continued in the same developmental direction even as the car became harder to drive, to the point where Verstappen was publicly demanding changes.
All of which suggests a level of questionable decision-making, of which the Lawson-Tsunoda switch is only the public tip of the iceberg. That particular call is a no-win for Red Bull. If Tsunoda smashes it on Sunday it only demonstrates their decision to overlook him for Lawson was flawed; if he fails then not giving Lawson a better shout also looks like an error, that it is not the drivers at fault but simply that Verstappen’s talent has concealed a fundamental problem.
Red Bull are 20 years on from their debut and still a formidable force. Yet there are no guarantees in F1. In the 80s and 90s the idea that teams such as Williams and McLaren might find themselves languishing as also-rans would have seemed fanciful. Yet Williams know only too well how far the mighty can fall while McLaren have only just emerged from more than a decade in the doldrums.
Past success counts for nothing when the slate is swept clean every season; the challenge is perhaps not so much how Tsunoda comes through this but how Red Bull themselves fare.