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Just before the start of the 2024 F1 season, I did a feature charting Red Bull's rise, fall, and then the subsequent rise to the top of the sport. The 2023 F1 season is the closest any team ever came to perfection. There were 22 races that season, and it won all but one.
That kind of win % has never been achieved in the history of F1. We had Max Verstappen beating the opposition into submission when he went on an unprecedented 10-race win streak. In terms of single-season records, countless were broken.
There was however one thing that stood out in all of this and it was the fact that the result could not just be attributed to the car being dominant. Every aspect of an F1 team was brilliant at Red Bull. It was almost a team with no weaknesses:
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- It had the best driver
- It had the best car designer
- It had the best operational unit
- It had the best strategic unit
- The team knew how to work under pressure
- The in-race execution was top-notch
- The entire organization worked in harmony
There were no chinks in the armor at Red Bull, and after dominating in 2023, many of the competitors had written off the 2024 and 2025 seasons as they waited for the regulations to change in 2026.
How did such a perfect team collapse so catastrophically and at such an accelerated pace? So much so that when you look at this team, in less than 12 months it has lost so much. So many key personnel are gone. For the first time in a while, Red Bull struggles to understand how to make the car work within these regulations.
Most importantly, the team is poised to lose the constructors championship this season while the drivers' championship is just hanging by a thread. How did this happen? Just like the rise of this team, the fall has been interesting. Let's look at the factors that caused it.
Red Bull's politics
The season began with the shocking news of team principal Christian Horner being investigated for cross-border behavior. While that rocked the boat a little, what became clear soon after was that behind the scenes, things were not as perfect as they used to be.
The numerous leaks from the Dutch and Austrian publications showed that the team was divided with Horner on one side and the Helmut Marko-Jos Verstappen duo on the other. While the case is done and dusted now and Horner has been able to assume the leadership role in a firm manner at Red Bull Racing, everything is not right at the top.
Marko and Horner have not appeared as a cohesive unit anymore and every time Verstappen gets an opportunity, he takes shots at the senior management within the team. For almost two decades, what was Red Bull's strength, the fact that it never had the trouble of politics being a hindrance, has now become its weakness and the team is in a bad state right now.
Helpless in preventing resource drain
The second problem has been the resource drain that the team has suffered from. It's not only a problem with Red Bull but with every top team that, with the cost cap in place, you can only give so much to the employees.
Red Bull lost Rob Marshall to McLaren because of this and the added opportunity, it lost Dan Fallows to Aston Martin, Adrian Newey is gone because he felt saturated, and now Jonathan Wheatley has left because he got a great opportunity from Audi. A lot of this resource drain is just unavoidable because the cost cap has truly restricted what the teams can do in terms of paying and retaining the resources.
Red Bull has been hurt by such a massive resource drain, as most notably Marshall's impact at McLaren can already be felt with the controversial Flexi Wings situation.
Too much dependence on Max Verstappen
This is something that's not often touched upon but since the 2019 F1 season when Daniel Ricciardo left Red Bull, the team has become increasingly dependent on Max Verstappen. This can be seen in the philosophy of its operation as well as the cars that the team has built.
It needs to be questioned that while Verstappen surely has a unique preference when it comes to his driving style in different cars, why has that led to a situation where Red Bull has built such extreme cars that only he can drive them to their full potential and the second driver continues to struggle.
This lopsided demand forced Red Bull to fire a formidable driver, Pierre Gasly. It was the same thing that mentally destroyed Alex Albon in 18 months. It has been the same issue that plagues Sergio Perez as well. To add to this, even the driver choices appear to have an inkling of Verstappen's being involved in indirect influence.
The fact that Carlos Sainz was available and the team did not go for him is as clear an example as any that the Verstappen family surely had a role to play in it. Red Bull has become a team that is so dependent on its lead driver for points that it has almost paralyzed itself in other aspects.
Lack of future-proofing
If tomorrow Max Verstappen decides that he wants to change teams and go to Mercedes, Aston Martin, or any other option, who would be a fallback option for the team? Does the team have a succession plan in place? Does the team have a driver making his way through the ranks who is good enough to be the next big thing? Is there someone in RB who could at least be a short-term solution? The answer is no.
Red Bull's driver academy was notorious for ruthlessness and churning through youngsters. That's not the case anymore, as Yuki Tsunoda has been part of the squad since 2021, and while the team is not convinced he's good enough for the senior team, he's still at RB, a team established to help groom young talent.
What makes it worse is that the second driver in that team is Daniel Ricciardo who has not done much to even be in F1. There's been a bit of complacency that has crept into the way the team works and that has certainly not helped. Such a large-scale exodus and no future-proofing on how the team would tackle a sudden loss of personnel is what has caught Red Bull out significantly.
Conclusion
If we look back at what Red Bull was when it climbed back to the top and dominated F1 to what this team is now, we can see that the DNA of the team is lost. It was a well-oiled machine that ticked every box. Even in 2014, when Sebastian Vettel announced his sudden departure, the team had a replacement available.
This team became complacent and it relaxed. The people at the helm assumed they would continue to win forever, and the power struggle began. The entire outfit took the eye off the ball, and that's why it is in deep trouble. The key ingredients that made Red Bull the unorthodox benchmark of F1 have been lost, and the result is right in front of us.
