Red Bull's Crisis: Verstappen's Candid Assessment Ignites Alarm
May 27 - The recent performance trend in Formula 1 is revealing an exciting new truth for fans - Max Verstappen and Red Bull are no longer cruising to each world championship.
With Charles Leclerc's Monaco win, the constructors' title gap is down to just 24 points - with Leclerc's deficit to Verstappen just 31 points.
"It's 31?" the Ferrari driver said. "Somebody told me 23, so I was excited. But I don't think about the championship for now anyway."
Indeed, although Red Bull has hit a snag with its 2024 car, Carlos Sainz insists it's just "common sense" that on "normal tracks" Verstappen will still win plenty of races this year.
"Domination, like we were seeing, hopefully not," said the Spaniard. "But favourites? Yes."
And with McLaren also right up there with Red Bull and Ferrari now, Leclerc thinks "the turning point of the season was a few races ago".
Verstappen said after finishing P6 in Monaco: "We know that some tracks just really don't suit our car at the moment.
"But the positive thing of this weekend is that it really highlighted our weakness, and that's what we have to work on. One bad race will not decide the champion, but I know that if you want to win the title, you have to perform consistently.
"This weekend we simply didn't deserve to be in the top three."
More alarming for Red Bull is that Verstappen reveals that "priority number 1 is to understand what the problem is, because we don't know that yet".
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Maybe if Max doesn't whine all weekend about the car and just provides constructive feedback instead of talking about kangaroos and headaches, they probably would have finished better in Q3. They had a good car if Max doesn't tap the wall and instantly get out of it they might have been in the top 3. The team has worked hard to address the car the last few races and MV needs to suck it up and get on board and quit talking about how fast and great Ferrari and McLaren are and how horrible and behind He and RB are. Id always tell my driver don't bad mouth the team and car and definitely don't heap praise on the competition, if you have nothing good to say about our team and car then just keep your mouth shut and quit being a dramatic prima donna!