Max Verstappen doesn’t think Red Bull has lost the ability to fight in F1 considering the dominance it held in the current era.
Having had a dominant run and being unchallenged in the last couple of F1 seasons, Red Bull has credible challenge in 2024 from McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes. Granted that some of the updates hasn’t worked but they have faltered slightly on the execution side too.
Although that goes hand-in-hand. When one is slightly in the dominant position, strategies don’t need much tinkering, but the moment you are in a situation of opposition, there is the need of strategy and execution to be on point to yield better results.
Considering the public display of lack of sync, it seems like Red Bull may have lost its ability to fight when in competition against other teams. But Verstappen doesn’t thinks so. He feels there are lot of variables involved in this than plain loss of ability.
“I personally don’t think so,” said Verstappen to media. “I mean the thing maybe is that with these new cars, probably some places you think you can overtake a bit easier, even though Hungary is still like a bit of a unique situation. Like Monaco it’s still very hard to pass plus it was a very hot day so tyres were running very very hot.
“When you’re following even when you have a tyre advantage within two laps your tyres overheat as well so then it becomes super hard to follow. Maybe let’s say we didn’t take that into consideration enough in our strategy. But again about these things we already spoke and I think they are quite clear now.
“And of course when you don’t have a car that is two three tenths faster a lot overtaking becomes a bit harder and that I guess made it also a bit harder fighting against the Ferrari and the Mercedes. But again, these things are looked at and hopefully of course we can learn from that because I think most of the time we did get the strategies right in the last few years even in critical races with rain or whatever.
“Sometimes you have maybe a bit of a bad day or an off day. It happens as long that you learn from it you know that’s the most important thing,” summed up Verstappen, who also gave credibility to the threat from McLaren and or Lando Norris in F1 2024.
But he thinks all Red Bull can do is focus on themselves rather than competition. They have to solve their own issues. “If they have the dominant car and keep winning of course, but at the end of the day we just need to focus on ourselves right because I think we can do things better maybe as well in terms of optimising the car performance,” he said.
“So that’s where my attention goes actually. Of course you have the championship in the back of your mind but I think we first need to focus on just trying to care about the strategy,” summed up Verstappen, as he and Red Bull continue to lead the championships, respectively, as we head into the second half of F1 2024.
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