In 2024, Red Bull went from an undisputed and unstoppable dominance to finishing third in the Constructors’ Championship. The Austrian team has thoroughly analyzed the RB20’s weaknesses and is now setting its sights on the goals for the 2025 season.
Last year’s Formula 1 championship saw several teams, including McLaren and Scuderia Ferrari, find the right formula (or almost) to bring their squads back to the front lines on race weekends. Their progress was so significant that the Constructors’ battle went all the way to Yas Marina. However, the same cannot be said for Red Bull.
Even before the season began, the Milton Keynes-based team was shaken by an internal investigation involving team principal Christian Horner, who was accused of inappropriate behavior toward a team employee, leading to what became known as “Horner Gate.” A series of internal power struggles followed, raising tensions in the paddock, particularly with figures like Helmut Marko and Jos Verstappen openly opposing Horner.
Now, however, Milton Keynes appears to have moved on, shifting its attention to the 75th edition of the Formula 1 World Championship. The team will field Max Verstappen and Liam Lawson, who replaces Sergio Perez—dismissed despite Red Bull having previously announced his contract renewal for the upcoming season. Consistency has been the key word for Red Bull’s mechanics as they worked on the RB21, aiming to ensure steady performance and adaptability across different circuits and weather conditions.
“We have a good understanding of the development,” Horner told RacingNews365, before explaining why the RB20 failed to maintain its early-season dominance.
“Around Imola, we introduced an upgrade that made the car significantly more unstable, with an extremely narrow operating window. When we managed to keep the car within that window, like in Austria, it was incredibly fast—fast enough to secure pole position with four consecutive laps. But it was crucial to stay in that window. Moving even slightly out of it made the car much harder to drive.”
Horner also addressed the performance gap between the four-time world champion and Perez, attributing Verstappen’s ability to compensate for the car’s shortcomings as a decisive factor:
“Max managed to mask the problem and adapt, while Checo struggled because the window was simply too narrow.”
“So, the engineers’ main objective over the winter has been to widen that window, not necessarily to increase peak performance, but to make the car more manageable across different circuits and conditions, ensuring a much broader operating range,” the British team principal concluded, outlining Red Bull’s technical approach for the upcoming Formula 1 season, which kicks off with the Australian Grand Prix from March 14-16.
Photo: Oracle Red Bull Racing, Christian Horner.