Red Bull Chief Calls Crisis Meeting As Team Scrambles To Fix Balance Woes

Saajan Jogia | Sep 1, 2024

Christian Horner, Team Principal of Oracle Red Bull Racing, speaks at the Red Bull Fan Zone, a private event at Oracle headquarters, on Wednesday October 18, 2023. / Jay Janner/American-Statesman / USA TODAY NETWORK

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner held a Zoom meeting with the team's top-level design and engineering departments, alongside Max Verstappen, in the wake of the RB20 F1 car's balance problem that is causing both drivers to struggle with the car's handling.

Red Bull faces a critical challenge after a mid-season upgrade backfired, leaving the team struggling to find a definitive solution. Efforts to resolve the problem have frequently triggered new issues, leaving the technical team perplexed.

Since his last victory at the Spanish Grand Prix six races ago, Verstappen has battled a poor setup and persistent understeer in his RB20, which saw him finish 23 seconds behind Lando Norris at Zandvoort. Despite a strong start to the season with seven wins in the first ten races, the three-time world champion's performance has noticeably declined over the past few Grands Prix.

Red Bull's attempts to turn the situation around in Hungary failed after the upgrades didn't deliver the expected results. With McLaren trailing Red Bull in the Constructors' Championship by 30 points, Horner scheduled a Zoom call last week to address the matter on priority as the team analyzes where it went wrong. Speaking about the meeting, former Red Bull driver Robert Doornbos told Ziggo Sport, as quoted by PlanetF1.com:

“You see that when the car performs less, the gap between Max and Perez becomes smaller. That’s crazy.

“That indicates that there is no balance, and the car no longer listens to its talent. It wants more bite at the front, but those engineers have to do that.

“Last week Christian Horner scheduled a Zoom call – because Max could not go to the factory – with the entire top of the engineering and design departments together, to explain that you can look at the data, but you also have to take the feeling of the driver into account.

“Max wants that car to bite at the front. If the rear moves, he will survive with his talent.

“You have two problems. You first have to get the balance right, and then the set-up. Then you fine-tune again, and then you dare more. Now he loses seven kilometers per hour to Lando Norris in the Parabolica alone, that is really a lot.

“They went back to the original floor from Bahrain. That’s race one. They’re now analysing where they made the wrong choice in the races after that. Let’s get started!”

Talking about Verstappen's "worst qualifying" performance of the season at Monza, where he secured seventh, Doornbos predicts a tough Italian Grand Prix for Red Bull. He added:

“It’s small things. He brakes with commitment for the first corner, but he doesn’t steer all the way from the white line.

“When exiting the corner you can also hear that he had wheelspin. That also indicates that you don’t have the mechanical grip in the car. When braking for the second chicane you want to take those kerbstones, if you have confidence in the car.

“When exiting Ascari, he has to weave through traffic. He tries to catch the slipstream of Sergio Perez. The lap before that, he already had a moment in the Parabolica, so in the second run he doesn’t dare to steer so well. Dare is a strong word, he has the knowledge of what the car can and cannot handle. It is Max’s worst qualifying in 2024.

“Qualifying is one thing, but if you don’t have a good qualifying car, you often don’t have a good race car either, because then the car eats the tyres. So the expectation of the race are not rosy.”