"The car did not respond how we wanted": Red Bull shares worrying assessment as McLaren steals the show

Red Bull director Pierre Wache has shared a worrying assessment of the team's pre-season test as he admitted that the car didn't respond the way the team had wanted. The Austrian team is coming off a deficit when it comes to how the squad ended the 2024 F1 season.

Last season was a bit of an enigma for Red Bull. The team started the year in dominant fashion, but as the year progressed, the car encountered serious issues when it came to making progress with the upgrades that were being added. The team was ultimately stuck in a situation where it was struggling to find out what went wrong and how it could get to a place where improvements could be made.

It wasn't until the race in Austin where Red Bull introduced a major upgrade that things started to change. By the end of the season, however, the Austrian team had the third or fourth fastest car depending on the tracks. Coming into the 2025 F1 season, the team had its expectations in check.

It even saw the squad introduce a new front wing to the car on the third day of the pre-season test. Talking about where the car is after the test, Red Bull's Pierre Wache told media, including Sportskeeda, that there were a few areas where the car didn't respond the way the team expected. He said:

“I am not as happy as I could be because the car did not respond how we wanted at times, but it is going in the right direction, just maybe the magnitude of the direction was not as big as we expected and it’s something we need to work on for the first race and future development.”

He added:

“It was not as smooth a test as we expected and the team expected, but it is better to find some problems here than later down the line and it is why we are here, to understand the car.”

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Red Bull on the expected pecking order going into Melbourne

When questioned where he felt Red Bull was in terms of performance, Pierre Wache opted not to delve into something like that as he said that the team was just focused on its own data and performance and did not pay much attention to others. He said:

“I think it’s very difficult to see a starting order for Melbourne across the grid right now, you see that four teams look quite quick, including us, but we didn’t look too much at other teams, we tried to focus on our programme.”

During the pre-season test, the team that truly shone was McLaren, as the lap times and the way the car conducted itself on the track were quite impressive. With that being said, the gap between the teams at the front or throughout the field is not going to be massive and hence we could see the pecking order shift from race to race.