'Something Has Been Going Wrong' At Red Bull

Red Bull might be cooked. Following this weekend’s Dutch Grand Prix, Max Verstappen’s 200th race, the championship leading driver has said that his car just doesn’t have the balance it once did. The 2024 Red Bull campaign started to go off the rails back at the Miami Grand Prix in May when a spate of bumpier street circuits showed the RB20 chassis was particularly sensitive to chunky surfaces and kerbs. The Zandvoort circuit doesn’t have that problem, but Red Bull was still way off the pace. So what gives?

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Following this weekend’s race at Zandvoort Verstappen had quite a lot to say about the car’s lack of pace.

“It wasn’t there in the first few races, but something in the car has made it more difficult to drive It’s very hard to pinpoint where that is coming from at the moment. And that is then hurting, of course, our one-lap performance, but also our long-run.

The whole weekend has been the same limitations. I had pretty much the same balance from FP1 all the way to the race, so it’s just very hard to solve at the moment. It just seems like we are too slow, but also quite bad on degradation at the moment. That’s a bit weird because I think the last few years normally we’ve been quite good on that.

So, something has been going wrong lately with the car that we need to understand and we need to quickly try to improve. It’s just not a connected balance, front or rear.”

It’s clear that Max is still able to drive the car above what it’s capable of, as he qualified the car in second position on the front row, just a matter of tenths shy of Lando Norris’ pole. When the race started Max got away from the line much better than his competitor in Papaya, nabbing the lead for a while. Until his tires fell all the way off the cliff and Norris streaked by and ran away to a comfortable lead. Now Max knows what it’s like when the shoe is on the other foot. At the start of the season Norris finished some 48 seconds behind Max at the checkered flag, and fifteen rounds later, Norris has a 22 second lead over Max, that’s an impressive turnaround.

The most innocuous explanation for this complete pace role reversal is that Red Bull’s chassis upgrades simply haven’t been as good as McLaren’s. Whatever direction the team has gone in with its design hasn’t translated to as much pace, and has actually come with a chassis balance and tire degradation disadvantage. Clearly McLaren has gone in the right direction, as it’s now seeing Lando Norris dropping bombs on the whole grid. Aero balance is still something of a dark art, and maybe Red Bull hasn’t sacrificed enough goats to the god of downforce.

Another explanation for Red Bull’s precipitous pace problem is a bit more nefarious. A recent FIA rule introduction regarding brake balance coincides nicely with Red Bull getting slower. The technical rules were tweaked ahead of the Dutch Grand Prix. Article 11.1.2 of the technical regs were updated to expressly forbid side-to-side brake balance tweaks. “The braking system must be designed so that, within each circuit, the forces applied to the brake pads are of the same magnitude and act as opposing pairs on a given brake disc.”

There is speculation in the paddock, which Red Bull denies, that the energy drinks company’s F1 team was running an illegal “T valve” which would effectively employ a ball bearing in the braking system to cut off some percentage of braking force to the outside tire in a high-G corner. Feeding this speculation fire is the unlikely brake-related Verstappen retirement at the Australian Grand Prix early in the season.

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This was first brought up by F1 journalist Peter Windsor on Twitter, where he posted “Looks as though RBR might have been running a clever rear cross-brake inertia valve before they were obliged to remove it before Miami. This could explain Max’s RR brake drama in MEL and his turn-in grief since China.”

A Red Bull mechanic replied “Yea… this is bullshit…. Unsurprisingly”

Regardless of the why, Red Bull will need to figure this out quickly if it wants to retain its lead in the drivers’ and constructors’ championships. Max Verstappen’s drivers’ championship points lead has shrunk to just 70 points, while McLaren has closed to within 30 points of Red Bull in the constructors’. There are still nine Grands Prix left in the season.

In theory, if the rest of the 2024 season sees Lando Norris win and take the fastest lap, while Max finishes second, Norris would win the championship by just 2 points. That seems like an unlikely scenario, but crazier things have happened. The constructors championship, however, is definitely within McLaren’s grasp. This season is turning out to be a little more interesting than initially thought.