Revealed: Red Bull's F1 battle plan

Red Bull knows what it’s like to dominate in F1. With Vettel driving, Adrian Newey designing and fizzy drinks money flowing, the Milton Keynes team won four consecutive drivers’ and constructors’ title doubles between 2010 and 2013. That run ended when F1 switched from 2.4-litre V8 engines to hugely complex 1.6-litre hybrid powertrains. This shifted the balance of power in performance terms from chassis to powertrain – and to manufacturer-operated teams that could design and engineer both elements in harmony.

Red Bull’s Renault power units were no match for those produced by Mercedes, and the team believing that its chassis was better than its results caused long-simmering tensions between it and the French manufacturer to become increasingly fractious and public.

With Renault buying back the Lotus team to run a full works effort in 2016, Red Bull spent three seasons using Renault power units with TAG Heuer branding. Verstappen’s hasty promotion from the second-tier Toro Rosso outfit early in 2016 – scoring a win in his first outing for Red Bull – was a boost, but it couldn’t make the squad an equal rival to Mercedes.

Still, Red Bull had a talented young driver in Verstappen and, it believed, as good a chassis as any team. Now it needed better engines. But from where? It found the answer in Honda, which in 2018 started supplying Toro Rosso after its own acrimonious break-up with McLaren.

The McLaren-Honda relationship collapsed after three years due to the Woking team’s frustrations with the Japanese powertrain’s shortage of power, and while Toro Rosso did bag some decent results in 2018, switching to Honda still seemed a major gamble by Red Bull.

But this decision has largely paid off: Verstappen took three wins, including Honda’s first in F1 since 2006, and Red Bull’s third place in the constructors’ championship put it well clear of Renault. But the team still wasn’t a match for Mercedes across the balance of the season.

The hope was that things would be closer in 2020 – but while Ferrari’s struggles have moved Red Bull up the order, the pace gap to Mercedes has, if anything, grown.

“As you’ve seen, the Mercedes is very fast,” says Toyoharu Tanabe, Honda’s F1 technical boss and something of a master of understatement. “The gap between the top teams is very big and has stayed that way. But both Red Bull and Honda are working very hard to improve our performance and catch up with them as soon as possible.”

Notably, despite the gap to Mercedes and the tensions in both Red Bull’s and Honda’s previous relationships, the alliance seems free of discord – perhaps because it’s clear that both the chassis and powertrain are lacking relative to the Mercedes.

“The performance gap comes from both chassis and power unit,” says Tanabe. “We can’t tell exactly where the time comes from, so we need to work together to improve our performance. We don’t say it’s the chassis and they don’t say it’s the power unit. We’re working very closely and hard.”

Verstappen echoes that sentiment; in fact, he reckons the relationship “has only become better” this season. “When you first start working together, it’s always a bit of a question about how communication will be,” he says. “But from the very first test, it has worked really well – and it got better through the year.

“We introduced a few upgrades throughout last year, and by the end of the year we were looking very strong. It’s all working well together this year: we’re just trying to find more performance.”

Red Bull has been hindered by a balance issue with its chassis that has made it difficult to drive on the limit and led to a number of spins for Verstappen and his Anglo-Thai teammate, Alex Albon. That imbalance has particularly hampered the RB16 in qualifying, which has left both drivers having to battle through the order to salvage results on Sundays.

Albon says: “At the moment, we don’t really know what’s going on from qualifying to the race. The race car is obviously faster, but we need to unlock it more in qualifying.” Those qualifying struggles and balance issues have particularly hampered Albon, leaving him well down the grid in some events, thus opening him up to incidents in races, such as his clash with Haas’s Kevin Magnussen in the British Grand Prix.

Albon denies that he’s struggling, saying: “I’m not worried in the sense that I feel like it’s been tough or it’s going badly.” The team seems to agree: after Albon qualified 12th for the British GP, Red Bull chief engineer Paul Monaghan said “the challenge lies more with us than it does with Alex, to be brutally honest”.

Red Bull team boss Christian Horner labelled the gap to Mercedes as “significant” but noted that his team rushed an upgrade package for the recent races at Silverstone, in part to solve the balance issue. He added: “Some of the philosophy at the front of the car changed over the winter, and it has given some anomalies that we need to understand.”

The problem for the Red Bull-Honda pairing is that opportunities to close the gap to Mercedes will be limited for the near future: as part of pandemic-induced cost-cutting, development of numerous parts has been frozen and teams must continue to use their 2020 cars next season. Essentially, it could be 2022, when a wide-ranging new rules package should reset the form books, when Red Bull and Honda truly have a hope of matching Mercedes.

That won’t stop them trying, but it’s why there’s increasing talk that, to get an F1 car worthy of his record-breaking talent, Verstappen needs to find his way out of Red Bull and into Mercedes. Hence the surprise earlier this year when he signed a contract extension to stay with the Austrian outfit until the end of 2023. So why? “I committed to the team because I believe in the team,” he explains. “At the moment, we’re behind Mercedes, but I’m also still very young. We’ll see. I’m not too worried about it.