Max Verstappen says Red Bull stills needs performance in order to beat its competition, as Christian Horner says they know where the weakness is.
It has been an up and down F1 2025 for Red Bull so far. It could be seen in the last triple-header where they performed excellent in Japan, but couldn’t back it up in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. The latter was still better than the former, where Verstappen managed to secure a podium finish.
The Dutchman reckons only via performance and consistency, Red Bull can imagine of being competitive in 2025 especially against rivals like McLaren, Mercedes and Ferrari. “I think we need to find more overall performance, balance especially, and of course consistency,” said Verstappen.
“We are not good at every track. That’s quite clear. Bahrain, we were lacking a lot. Saudi Arabia, for sure, it was a lot better. But it’s also very low deg and then more cars come alive. So we still have work to do, but at least it’s a promising result. Overall, it was a promising weekend, at the end of the day.
“We really managed to find a good balance or a decent balance, and that’s, of course, positive for us,” summed up Verstappen, as Horner concurred with the Dutchman on finding performance. He notes that work is on behind the scenes, with an update package likely to be ready by Imola.
“If you look back at the triple header on a whole, we had two pole positions,” said Horner. “The first and the second, Bahrain was the outlier that we were out the window. And we know there’s areas of the car that we need to improve and we’re working very hard to address some of those.
“Of course, everybody was super disappointed in the outcome of the race in Saudi Arabia and it felt like a race that we had McLaren beat, but it is what it is we have to say congrats to Oscar and we’ll take the positives out of the weekend and focus on Miami,” summed up Horner.
Here’s Yuki Tsunoda on hit from Pierre Gasly
Here’s the whole Max Verstappen and Oscar Piastri episode