2025 Red Bull F1 car “can’t be worse than last year”

Max Verstappen believes the 2025 Red Bull Formula 1 challenger is a significant improvement on its predecessor but stated nothing can be “worse than last year”.

The Red Bull driver clinched a fourth world title in 2024 despite his team falling to third behind McLaren and Ferrari in the constructors’ standings after poor mid-season development.

Red Bull struggled with a car that was unpredictable and had poor balance leading to it winning just two of the final 14 grands prix compared to seven of the opening 10.

Now, speaking in Bahrain at F1 2025 pre-season testing, Verstappen revealed the new car is better “everywhere” but the bar for improvement was not very high.

“It can’t be worse than last year,” he said on day two of testing. “So I think the direction that we are working into is good.

“We just need to follow that and see how much we can extract. At the moment, it’s really early days – a lot of things we are still discussing and wanting to improve.

“But yesterday I enjoyed it and that’s already a big difference to last year.”

Last season was the first time for a while that Verstappen and Red Bull did not have the strongest package, as the Dutchman dominated 2023 winning 19 of the 22 grands prix.

So, when asked how much influence Verstappen had been given on the development of the 2025 challenger compared to previous models, he said: “Some cars don’t need much influence. For myself and the team, at some point last year we knew something was up.

“Of course a few things have to be addressed and that’s why quite a few things have changed.

“So I give my feedback on what I need – the car needs to go faster and that’s what we try to apply.

“I think the team learned a lot from last year. We tried to solve those problems and now we have to see how the car performs in Australia, which is another completely different circuit [to Bahrain].”