Even if Max Verstappen and Yuki Tsunoda finished 1-2 in every remaining grand prix and sprint round of the 2025 Formula 1 season, with Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris failing to finish, Red Bull still could not overhaul McLaren in the constructors’ championship. But Verstappen still has a chance, albeit slim, of seizing the drivers’ title.
To that end, Red Bull has continued to bring developments to the RB21, including a new front wing geometry in Singapore, before pivoting completely to the all-new car required for 2026. Only Verstappen has the new design this weekend.
“The car is better,” Red Bull chief engineer Paul Monaghan told selected media including Autosport in the FIA’s mandatory ‘show and tell’ tech briefing in Singapore.
“Now the question is, can we challenge the previous order from the high-downforce circuits and see if we can win? We’ll have a go, see how we get on. It should be a bit better. The question is, how much?”
Although Verstappen’s back-to-back wins in Monza and Baku might suggest the trend line for performance has shifted dramatically upwards, those were both low-downforce circuits which masked some of the RB21’s perceived shortcomings. Circuits requiring higher downforce – such as Singapore – have ruthlessly exposed Red Bull’s problems with drag efficiency, something the team experienced with the RB20 and tried to dial out of the RB21 – unsuccessfully at first.
At high-downforce tracks Red Bull’s car has been draggier and less stable than its McLaren rival, suffering unpredictable shifts of balance through the different phases of cornering at high speeds. The team’s focus throughout this season has been to achieve, as quickly as possible and without compromising 2026 development, the goals it had actually set for the beginning of the year.
Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing
Photo by: Mohd Rasfan – AFP – Getty Images
A new floor introduced at Silverstone, followed by another package added at Belgium which included a new front wing as well as revisions to the sidepods, opened up new avenues of development which could be achieved relatively cheaply and rushed through production before the 2026 project began occupying manufacturing capacity.
The new floor for Monza was the last big-ticket item with a long lead time. What we’re seeing now was likely signed off immediately after the summer break, when the team revised its high-downforce front wing for Zandvoort.
Since the front wing is a visible area of the car, Red Bull has to explain the purpose of the change in the FIA technical document circulated ahead of the event. It described the new geometry as “taking further research to increase the camber of some wing sections to extract more load whilst maintaining flow stability”.
“We hope to extract a bit more lap time from it,” explained Monaghan. “It’s quite a subtle revision. “But as the last one was released [for Zandvoort], more evidence became clear: ‘Oh, we could do this and we could do that.’
“A little bit of capacity is available, so we’ve gone ahead and pushed the button and said, ‘Yeah, we’ll bring that.’ It should be the last one for this year. There might be some flap trims for Vegas or something like that, as usual. But otherwise, yeah, it’s a little bit of performance, and some great work in the factory, and we’ve got it here.
“The manufacturing group is in a bit of a, not a holding pattern, but the 2026 car has not yet swamped them, so there’s a little window to say we could do this, and – brilliant work from them – they’ve got on and done it.”
Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing
Photo by: Zak Mauger / LAT Images via Getty Images
Since there will be no more new components apart from circuit-specific trims, the onus is now on the trackside team to extract the maximum from the latest package. Verstappen’s interest in the current season has been reinvigorated by his wins in Monza and Baku but the team must sustain that momentum.
Singapore is the one venue where Verstappen has never won. The question is whether the subtle improvements the latest updates have been yielding will add up to Red Bull being more competitive here; it will have to do better than it did in Zandvoort, the last high-downforce track on the calendar, where Verstappen had no answer to the race pace of the two McLarens.
“I think it will give us a nice confidence boost, perhaps a little bit of a massage, shall we say, if we go really well here,” said Monaghan. “But if we don’t, then we’re not going to just give up and go to Austin as if we’re not going to do anything. We will go to Austin as if we can try and win that race as well.
“All sorts can happen here – you can go to Turn 1 and get punted out. Remember the footage of Seb [Vettel] arriving there with a couple of Ferraris [in 2017] and it’s chaos, isn’t it?
“I think we will do our best here, we will extract what we can from the car, Max and Yuki will do their bit, and Austin is two weeks away and we’ll approach it in the same way. We’ll just try and win it and see what happens.”
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– The Autosport.com Team
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