Why Red Bull wasn't surprised to face a greater challenge in 2024 

When Max Verstappen crossed the finish line in his RB19 at Suzuka last year, winning by 20 seconds over the next non-Red Bull car, few minds in Formula 1 might have imagined that, come the summer break, the 2024 season would have the widest race victory success spread in 12 years. Except, it seems, within Red Bull itself.

The team stunned F1 with the big changes to the upper aerodynamic surfaces of the RB20 compared with its illustrious predecessor. Its early season form – which should have been a clean sweep but for Verstappen’s brake exploding and Sergio Perez putting in the first of many underwhelming displays in Melbourne – suggested all were going to be carried before once again.

But inside that sprawling Milton Keynes industrial-estate-cum-‘campus’, we now know that Red Bull had already realised its 2024 challenger hadn’t made the gains its designers were predicting in high-speed corners. It had improved in lower-speed stuff but, like the RB19, this year’s machine still hates kerbs – a big problem given F1’s penchant for cash-stuffed city venues.

And so, faced with the dawning possibility of actual competition in 2024 as rival squads had the chance to catch up, which they duly took, perhaps this is a new dynamic to read into all the melodrama that surrounded a very sad and serious case within Red Bull at the season’s start?

Verstappen’s head being turned towards a new squad (Mercedes) well before his expected current contract end in 2028 really happened, after all. So, the questions now become: was he agitating for an exit because, in addition to everything else going on within Red Bull’s management war, he really feared this wasn’t the best place to be for much longer?

Or was it that he hoped to beat impetus into car improvements given what he’d felt in the initial miles of the RB20’s life? After the public criticism Verstappen delivered with unrelenting dressage-trainer-whipping sting in Hungary – when Red Bull’s biggest in-season development package so far didn’t deliver the gains he wanted – we can see how that’s a tactic he favours.

Verstappen's vocal criticism of his team has been a marked contrast to what has gone before

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

There’s now a very real possibility McLaren can overhaul Red Bull in the 2024 constructors’ championship. This is given just how fast the orange squad was catching up after its Miami upgrades worked so well – where in the sapping swamp heat your humble columnist was stunned to see just how much the MCL38 now looked like a Red Bull creation, sans the high-waisted cooling gulleys of the RB20 – and that it apparently has plenty more development ideas yet to deploy.

At the same time, Perez has imperilled a constructors’ crown he’s already cost Red Bull once, in 2021, by failing to get near Verstappen’s points total. And now there’s apparently no suitable replacements from a seemingly subdued and inconsistent driver stable.

We should be castigating them for being so far off in late 2022 and in all of 2023 – during which F1 endured such tedium when the current excitement was possible all along

Verstappen is too good to lose the drivers’ title with such a big pre-summer-break points gap. But he’s making mistakes taking the RB20 to limits he didn’t need to find with the RB19. The rest are finally back with him.

Although of course while congratulating McLaren, Mercedes and (to a lesser extent) Ferrari for finally getting things right-er, we should be castigating them for being so far off in late 2022 and in all of 2023 – during which F1 endured such tedium when the current excitement was possible all along.

“We expected the opposition to come earlier,” Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache sagely noted back in July.

So, Red Bull knew all along. That doesn’t make it the bad guy. If anything F1 should be thanking this massive drama factory for helping make 2024 so interesting after all.

The prospect of F1 being so competitive in 2024 appeared a distant dream at the start of the season

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images