How a calm Max Verstappen hints at a potential breakthrough moment for Red Bull

On paper, Max Verstappen’s championship hopes took another blow in Azerbaijan, but the Baku weekend hinted there are reasons for optimism at Milton Keynes.

Qualifying a low-key sixth for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, Max Verstappen was unable to join in the fight for victory on Sunday, but the championship leader displayed none of the anger and frustration one might have expected as his lead shrunk a little more.

Red Bull responds to Monza woes with revised floor in Baku

Having gone without a win since June’s Spanish Grand Prix, plenty has been written about the derailment of Red Bull’s championship aspirations as McLaren has become a relentless force to close in and overtake the Milton Keynes-based squad in the Constructors’ Championship.

While Woking has improved the McLaren MCL38, seemingly at will, Red Bull’s development path for the RB20 has seen the reigning World Champions stumped by the real-world behaviour of their car as team boss Christian Horner has spoken about a disconnect in the data between the team’s wind tunnel figures and what is happening to the car on the track.

It’s a carbon copy of what went on with Mercedes throughout 2022 and ’23 – the development path for the car yields results according to every possible simulation available, only for the car to behave completely differently once put on track.

When a team is no longer able to trust its data, it can lead to panic – how can issues be rectified when there isn’t a clear picture as to what is causing the correlation issue, especially when you can’t start afresh in the middle of a season?

It’s led to a series of races for Red Bull that would be unfathomable to think about last year, or even earlier this season, as Verstappen has become an also-ran – even podiums have become scarce – the lack of pace not helped by the RB20 suddenly chewing through its tyres and leaving Verstappen and Sergio Perez powerless to stop McLaren from passing Red Bull to open a 20-point lead in the standings.

Speaking at Monza, where his team took a drubbing to finish sixth and eighth on genuine pace, Horner explained: “There’s a balance issue with the car that isn’t allowing the drivers to commit to corner entry. So as soon as you calm down the rear, you do that by compromising the front. So then you end up with understeer, and then you kill your tyre that way.

“So I think what we really need to do is get the map… Or if you look at the McLaren, it almost looks like an evolution of last year’s car, a much simpler car than ours. Perhaps we’ve gone a little too complex and perhaps we need to simplify a few things.”

Turning towards experimenting with things, a previous-specification floor at Zandvoort was brought in a bid to establish a known baseline, but this didn’t work to improve things either – the car might have handled a little more pleasantly, but it was too slow as Max Verstappen came home over 20 seconds down on Lando Norris.

Indicating just how difficult the current regulations appear to be for the teams to develop for – not only Red Bull are scratching their heads – Mercedes showed up with an old-specification floor in Azerbaijan to try figuring out its own balance issues, while Red Bull was the only team from the top four to show up with an update – a direct response to the struggles the team endured through Zandvoort and Monza.

Boasting a revised floor body, the RB20 had different tunnel geometry with the aim of ‘improving pressure gradients along the floor’ for better ground-effect aerodynamic performance.

These changes were described as “remarkably subtle” in a geometric sense by Red Bull’s chief engineer Paul Monaghan on Friday but, in a ground-effect era, could those “subtle” changes yield huge rewards?

“Could the effect be good? Yes,” Monaghan said. “And I think the proof of the pudding will be on Sunday afternoon.”

Friday was thus encouraging for Red Bull as Verstappen promptly went quickest in the first practice, while Sergio Perez showed his usual Baku form by all but matching Charles Leclerc’s leading time in the later session.

Qualifying was less tranquil, with Perez leading the charge in fourth place, while Verstappen could only manage sixth – more than half a second from the pole time set by Leclerc. For whatever reason, Red Bull didn’t seem to have been able to go with the pace increase through practice and into qualifying.

The race unfolded with Verstappen unable to keep pace with the lead pack, falling further and further back. Worse, his strategy was seriously compromised after his pit stop as he came up behind the one-stopping Alex Albon and Lando Norris and ended up getting cooped up behind his championship rival.

Every lap that passed for Verstappen behind the duo widened the window of opportunity for Norris to close the gap later in the race as his potential advantage shrunk – and this duly came to pass late in the race as Verstappen was reeled in and passed by Norris as the McLaren enjoyed its fresh medium tyres.

On paper, then, the race should have seen Verstappen respond with the type of fury and frustration that was evident in Hungary as the circumstances of his new reality set in – but the Dutch driver was surprisingly calm as he spoke to media afterward. Exploring his comments, his demeanour suggested there’s been a change in the level of confidence within Red Bull, despite the struggles of the race.

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What did Max Verstappen say to hint at Red Bull improvements?

Verstappen was surprisingly chirpy as he took care of his post-race media duties, revealing that a setup change he had gambled on after the third practice had backfired.

There have been suggestions elsewhere that Verstappen held his tongue as a result of his criticisms of the car on Saturday being met negatively within the Red Bull camp – suggestions that PlanetF1.com understands to be inaccurate.

But there’s no denying that Verstappen was not all doom and gloom as he gave his version of events after the race.

In a bid to make the car better to drive, he had opted for a tweak to his setup that proved to take the car in the wrong direction – which he realised almost immediately in Q1. But, with the cars in parc ferme the moment he left the pitlane, there was no rowing back on that change – dooming him for the rest of the weekend.

“I think we just paid the price with the change that we made into qualifying that made it just really difficult to drive,” the championship leader explained.

“The car was jumping around a lot. The wheels were coming off the ground in the low-speed corners, so you don’t have a contact patch with the tarmac and it’s very difficult.

“We tried to make it better, but we made it worse.”

But there was no anger on display, none of the aggravation of recent weeks as he’d tried to emphasise to Red Bull that the development direction had gone wrong. Having been no longer able to overcome the issues with the car’s inherent behaviour earlier in the summer, it had brought back some of the old angry Max – but this wasn’t the case on Sunday, despite Lando Norris closing the gap marginally in the championship.

Confirming that he’d been involved in the decision to make the setup change which proved so costly, he was as matter of fact as usual: “I mean, you know, you win and lose as a team. We thought it would be a good direction to go into and, in the end, it wasn’t.”

On top of his calm temperament, his positivity regarding the changes made to the RB20 was evident. After all, he can’t argue the car was uncompetitive when the other RB20 was up front fighting for the win.

Undoubtedly reassured by seeing Sergio Perez fight for victory and the podium places for the first time since China, a driver he knows he’s got the measure of nine times out of 10, Verstappen’s comments indicated that he was much happier with the handling of his car and the rapid response of Red Bull to the increasingly critical position it has found itself in.

“I think it was a good step, yeah,” he said of the revised floor.

“The overall behaviour is better. Unfortunately, we just made a few wrong decisions going into qualifying that we paid the price on.”

While Verstappen’s setup experiment suggests the window for the RB20 is still quite small, given his tweaks took the car in the complete opposite direction he was pursuing, Perez’s immeasurably better performance is the eye-opener that suggests Red Bull has made inroads into understanding the RB20 issues.

Horner explained that the setup differences between the two cars led to very different feelings for the drivers, which would trigger a “post mortem”, but Perez had been happier with the balance and feel. More importantly, despite running at the elevated pace up front in the three-car convoy, Perez hadn’t chewed through the tyres in the same way as Verstappen.

“[With] Max, obviously, we need to look at the variances in setup. He wasn’t as happy with his car as Checo [Perez] was,” Horner said.

“But I think, if you take Checo as the baseline here, I think that we have made improvements. We just need to understand the differences and improve further.

“Max definitely was going through the tyres quicker, both on the medium and on the hard tyre.

“So again, we’ve got to look at the variances in setup between the two cars to understand that.

“Checo, meanwhile, was able to follow line astern for pretty much the entire Grand Prix. I don’t think he was ever more than two seconds behind the car ahead and he still managed to, from what we could see on the television, keep his tyres still in good condition compared to those around him.”

Two weeks ago, Verstappen had been firm in his assessment of the championship picture – the titles would be out of reach as long as Red Bull couldn’t understand how to get on top of the car. Despite the result in Azerbaijan, this defeatist verdict was not the case on this occasion – with Verstappen also clinging to the positive of having been beaten to the chequered flag by Norris.

“It is [a wasted opportunity], but you can also turn it around and say they could have done a better job as well, right?” he said.

“So it is what it is. I think we learned a lot – the car did feel a bit better than what we had before, but, with the setup, we maybe went the wrong way and we’ll try to do better.

“If you look at my race, probably everything just was the worst-case scenario, my general balance that I had and then being stuck behind Alex and Lando. So yeah, then, of course, it’s not a surprise at all.

“I think if we do a better job ourselves, they need to have a perfect end to the year.”

Red Bull evaluating next steps in critical championship run-in

Of course, one swallow does not a summer make – the fact Red Bull did have race win potential with their usually slower number two driver isn’t a sign that the RB20 is suddenly going to be back winning races with ease when Verstappen doesn’t make such a setup error.

After all, Verstappen still failed to unlock the potential within the car, showcasing just how easy it is to do that with a narrow operating window.

But the seeds have been sown for a more positive ending to the season as Verstappen bids to win the title with a little more authority as recent races have suggested it might be done in a whimpering fashion.

There’s no doubt the RB20, like the MCL38, is a jaw-droppingly quick F1 car – the difference being that McLaren’s development, whether that be through better correlation, a more simplistic approach, the advantage of the extra hours of CFD and wind tunnel testing, or plain good old-fashioned fortune, has resulted in stronger and more consistent performance.

Red Bull’s own development path led them astray, creating a “monster” with only flashes of its outright potential shining through on occasion – such as in qualifying at Spa-Francorchamps, for example.

But the potential of the car is still there to be exploited, and Baku hinted that the team has finally figured out how to start doing just that – Monza’s shocking display seemingly giving the team the kick up the rear it needed to start responding.

There’s also a sense that Perez – a driver who has always thrived on confidence – has been vindicated by his struggles, which he fully admits being less able to drive around than Verstappen, also now being encountered by Verstappen. With Red Bull now seemingly digging upward, his performance in Baku highlighted the strength of Perez to bounce back as the pressure on his seat has eased – the car is the bigger problem for Red Bull at this point.

“The lessons are kind of ongoing, and the immediate reaction tends to be [seen in] the later races,” Monaghan said.

“So, it’s a testament to everybody that we got [the new floor] here. A lot of hard work, and that hard work will continue.

“Singapore’s only a week away. So that will be potentially another evolution for us.

“We’re not going to sit still from these comments [from Verstappen], or our performance in Monza, and do nothing to bring here, and hope.

“There are many ways to address what we found on the car or the car’s behaviour from Monza, and it touches all the aspects of the car, not just whether we revise a floor geometry or wing geometry.”

In recent weeks, there have also been comments from Horner that Red Bull will be looking to introduce its own revised front wing with greater flexibility. The team has sought clarification from the FIA regarding the flexing McLaren front wings and, with the FIA dragging its heels on introducing more strict static tests, there’s no rule stopping Red Bull (and Ferrari) from making its own front wings that little bit more flappy.

With Monaghan suggesting more evolution on the floor front, if Baku was indeed the first step in the right direction of understanding what went wrong, Singapore will likely prove a decisive event on whether or not Red Bull needs to respond with a major upgrade package as it figures out its development and resource allocation for the rest of the season as F1 2025 hoves into view.

A month-long gap after Singapore gives Red Bull the “freedom to potentially do more”, Monaghan said, although there are other factors to be taken into account for the Austin weekend that comes afterward.

“The real [priority] is you don’t force yourself into doing [upgrades],” he explained.

“The disciplined approach is to say, ‘Is it valuable enough to spend the money to do it, to take it to Austin?’

“And don’t forget, Austin’s a sprint race, so you’re going to roll the dice in FP1 and then go, ‘OK, yes, no, indifferent, keep it, not keep it’. But that then leaves us potentially with few of any one piece.

“So, your choices for Austin are team-dependent and somewhat confidence-dependent.”

“Look, we’re pushing hard. We’re now not defending, we’re chasing. So it changes the dynamic again, and we’re just gonna throw everything at it.”

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