Red Bull is focusing on widening the operating window of its 2025 Formula 1 car over adding ultimate performance during the off-season, following a loss of form last year.
Max Verstappen won seven of the first 10 races in 2024, and went on to win a fourth consecutive drivers’ championship despite only picking up two further wins all season. The drop-off in performance came from an update that team principal Christian Horner says still made the car quicker overall, but made it particularly difficult to extract that pace consistently.
“I think we’ve got a good understanding of development-wise where things weren’t [working],” Horner said. “I would say around Imola we introduced an upgrade that made the car far more peaky in its performance, and it had a very narrow operating window.
“When you got it into that window — the four straight laps in Austria, for example, that were all good enough for pole — it was very much in that window. If you stepped a millimeter either side of it, it became much more of a problematic car to drive, which Max was able to mask and drive around, and I think that’s what hurt Checo [Perez] particularly — it’s that window was so narrow.
“And so I think what the engineers have been very much focused on over the winter is how you broaden that window. Not necessarily adding ultimate performance but just broadening the window so that you’ve got, across the different challenges and circuits that we visit, a much wider operating window.”
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Although Perez continued to struggle and eventually lost his seat, the last two victories for Verstappen came in the final four rounds of the season, and Horner says that shows progress was being made with last year’s car that bodes well for 2025.
“In some of the [final] races, I think that we brought some performance to the car,” he said. “Austin [Circuit of The Americas], we managed to get the Sprint pole and win the Sprint race, we should’ve arguably had the pole [for the Grand Prix]. Funnily enough, it was another George Russell incident that cost us the pole in Austin!
“Obviously, the win in Brazil — but also encouraging in Brazil was the performance in the dry, in the Sprint race. And a day like the Sunday in Brazil, Max shone above all others and still produced 14 laps that were good enough for the fastest lap.
“The turnaround that we had in Qatar and the pole and the victory, again showing that, I think, we’re on the right trajectory. But none of the competitors will be standing still, and you can’t take anything for granted. But I think we’ve started to understand some of the issues with the car.”