Verstappen Fights for Fourth Title Despite Red Bull's Ongoing Woes
Sep.19 - Red Bull is making feverish efforts, and leaving no stone unturned, to recover from the Formula 1 team's current performance dip.
McLaren raced past the reigning champions at Baku and now holds a 20 point lead in the constructors' standings that Dr Helmut Marko believes is basically impossible to catch.
"It will be difficult," the team advisor told Bild newspaper. "McLaren has a car that works on every track.
"We have to concentrate on Max (Verstappen) and the drivers' championship."
Verstappen is still 59 points ahead of Lando Norris in the drivers' championship, and the team is determined to do everything possible to stay ahead.
For instance, while sister team RB is using a special denim-inspired livery in Singapore this weekend, Red Bull Racing has scrapped its own plan for a special livery - because of the weight of the paint.
Red Bull told Germany's Auto Motor und Sport that the planned Singapore livery would have added a kilo of weight to the car - which Bild newspaper calculated at a mere 0.03 seconds per lap.
Marko says Red Bull is already on the way to putting the performance crisis in the past.
"With this generation of cars, it is such a fine line that one wrong step makes the car dramatically worse," he explained. "That happened to Ferrari, and it's happened to Aston Martin now. And us.
"But thank God we have recognised the mistake and are on the way to correcting it."
Marko also admits staff losses, including Adrian Newey but also Jonathan Wheatley and others, has had an effect.
To recover from the loss of sporting director Wheatley, Verstappen's race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase will now double as 'head of racing', while other internal promotions will fill the rest of the gaps.
"We must not forget that a few very good employees have left us," Marko said. "Success simply arouses desire, but the truth is that we can only fill every top position in management or engineering once.
"We have to allow people to accept that other teams can offer them a better position with more money. We just have to make sure that the structure stays together," the Austrian added.
Former F1 driver Ralf Schumacher points the finger at Christian Horner, who refused to step down amid his scandal earlier in 2024. "Christian said 'people can leave if they want'," Schumacher told Sky Deutschland. "'We're so strong as a team, we can absorb it'.
"That was a classic misjudgement, as we can see now."
Former team driver Robert Doornbos thinks Red Bull's budget is now stressed to the max due to the current situation - made worse by Sergio Perez's big crash at the wheel of the updated RB20 in Baku.
"There's a lot of work for Red Bull and the design team and at the same time a lot of headache," he told his Youtube channel, "because the damage from Perez all comes out of the development budget."
However, Dutch former F1 driver Giedo van der Garde tips Verstappen to lift the drivers' championship trophy for the fourth consecutive time at the end of the season.
"If the car does not get better, he will become champion due to his mentality," he told drs De Race Show. "Max has serious experience and he understands exactly how to win the title.
"What happens if Lando and Max are fighting for the title in the last lap? Will he take Norris out? I won't say that's what will happen, but in my opinion, Max could do that if the title is at stake."
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"What happens if Lando and Max are fighting for the title in the last lap? Will he take Norris out? I won't say that's what will happen, but in my opinion, Max could do that if the title is at stake."
That would be so ironic and reminiscent of the Senna Prost championship endings