Max Verstappen wins the drivers’ championship, but Red Bull will come away empty-handed in the constructors’ championship in 2024: expert Marc Surer on the problems facing the former winning team
Max Verstappen clinched the drivers’ title again in 2024, for the fourth time in a row. However, in the constructors’ championship, Red Bull had to admit defeat to both McLaren and Ferrari this time, after two consecutive successes, despite still dominating at will in 2023 with an incredible 21 victories.
But in 2024, despite a good start to the season with the RB20, the team quickly ran out of steam, with Verstappen only managing two Grand Prix victories in Brazil and Qatar in the second half of the season.
“You can see that when you look at the statistics with the improvements: the Red Bull was at its limit. You couldn’t improve the Red Bull any more,”
Surer: ‘They developed in the wrong direction’
Surer: ”That’s why the others all got closer because they still had room for improvement. They hadn’t reached their limit yet.” Unlike the RB20: “With the Red Bull, every new feature they brought actually made the car slower or more difficult to drive. So they were in line,” explains the Swiss driver, referring to the team’s long dry spell in terms of victories during the summer months.
But what could Red Bull have done differently? At some point, the engineers seemed downright helpless, and the changes they made seemed to make everything worse instead of better: “That’s exactly how it was. They did have better results in the wind tunnel because of more downforce, but the car was no longer driveable,” says Surer.
“And when Max says it’s no longer driveable, that means something. Then it really is undriveable,” judges the former Formula 1 driver: ‘With Perez, you saw it then, he got stuck six times in Q1. So it’s clear: they were developing in the wrong direction. They wanted to make the car faster and made it undriveable.’
At least: In the end, Red Bull managed to stop the negative spiral somewhat. Surer: “Max, and I think Helmut Marko too, they’ve already hit the brakes and said, ‘We should actually go back on this.’ And from Baku on, they started going back on it.”
But in the Constructors’ Championship, the train against the stronger competition had long since left…
