The evidence behind claims that Red Bull’s in a ‘crisis’

“Crisis? What Crisis?” A three-word headline on the cover of The Sun newspaper in 1979 that helped bring down the British government.

Strictly speaking, what prime minister James Callaghan, looking tanned and relaxed, told reporters as he returned from a trade summit in the West Indies was: “I don’t think other people in the world would share the view there is mounting chaos.”

But this would have made for a rather less crisp and striking headline.

Red Bull isn’t exactly operating against a background of ingrained economic weakness and pretty much everybody, including the gravediggers, going on strike. Also, Max Verstappen is just eight points off the lead of the world championship.

And yet the impression remains of an organisation with deeply ingrained problems to resolve.

There is a certain circularity to the F1 media. It was our Motorsport.com colleague Ronald Vording who intercepted Helmut Marko in the Bahrain paddock as Red Bull’s ‘driver advisor’ hastened to a hurriedly convened post-race council of war also featuring team principal Christian Horner, chief engineer Paul Monaghan and technical director Pierre Wache.

In our headline, we labelled this impromptu and unprecedented pow-wow to represent “crisis talks” since that is what it appeared to be. Other outlets naturally picked up the story, hence Sky Sports F1’s presenters putting Horner on the spot about “crisis meetings” when he appeared on camera in Jeddah after FP1, a session in which Verstappen and Yuki Tsunoda were but ninth and 10th fastest.

Horner naturally declaimed this notion, saying, “If you sit down with your engineers and discuss the race, I wouldn’t describe that as a crisis summit.” Indeed, but if the senior heads rush to gather after a race, having not been witnessed doing so ever before, this points to an unusual sense of urgency even if one cavils at using the c-word.

And, to paraphrase Callaghan, do other teams share the view there is mounting chaos at Red Bull? Assuredly they do.

So, while Horner’s party line is very much “Crisis? What crisis?”, Verstappen’s win in Japan is looking very much like an outlier. Before the team boss went into public denial mode, he admitted Red Bull had lost correlation between simulation results and on-track performance.

This is not a problem that goes away quickly and easily – and, even if circumstances align on a given weekend to enable a capricious car to perform, the fundamental issue has not been resolved. Verstappen and Tsunoda’s humble placing in FP1 in Jeddah can be explained away by that session occurring at an unrepresentative time of day given that the race is at night, plus Red Bull generally runs lower engine modes on Fridays anyway.

FP2 was superficially more encouraging given that Verstappen was third behind the two McLarens – but his RB21 was a quarter of a second adrift and “still not where I want it to be”. Tsunoda, who crashed and brought out a red flag in the middle of a long run rather than a qualifying simulation, was running a different set-up since the team is still experimenting with the car.

So, although Horner frames the RB21’s instability issues as “vices” that only cost fractions of a second here and there across a lap and can be “tidied up”, objective examination of the evidence indicates a team still reaching for explanations.

When a difficult car performs well unexpectedly, as the RB21 did in Verstappen’s hands in Japan, it is as problematic as when the car is misbehaving with a similar absence of explanation. While a team is happy to bank points from a random good result, bad correlation is still bad correlation.

It has become almost a cliche for Horner to describe Red Bull’s wind tunnel as “a relic of the cold war” and he repeated that epithet in Jeddah – but it is no less true for being oft repeated. In Red Bull’s previous existence as Jaguar Racing, it tried to buy the former Royal Aircraft Establishment’s low-speed wind tunnel at Thurleigh Airfield, one of four tunnels on that site.

Red Bull’s current wind tunnel was first acquired in its Jaguar days back in 2003

Photo by: Rainer W. Schlegelmilch / Motorsport Images

At the time it lost out to Arrows, but then made the administrators an offer when that team went bust a year later. In the interim, it bought the former Reynard tunnel at Bicester, which it later passed on to the team now known as Racing Bulls.

The suite of tunnels at Thurleigh played a role in the development of every post-war British aircraft, including Concorde. What made the slow-speed tunnel particularly prized was its 246-metre air circuit that enabled the fan to turn relatively slowly, reducing turbulence: the tunnel incorporated a ‘throat’ section, which increased the air pressure as it reached the working area.

It also had a rolling road, initially installed to help simulate the take-off and landing of aircraft. Hugely advanced for its time, less so with the passing of years: when Jaguar acquired the tunnel, its fan blades were still made from polished mahogany.

Certain elements, such as the fundamental concrete structure of the tunnel, cannot easily be upgraded – which is why Red Bull announced in 2023 that it would be building a new one. For years now the team has blamed correlation problems on weather fluctuations introducing uncertainty into the results: very cold or warm weather penetrates the building’s structure too easily, which affects airflow.

Horner’s contention is that this is especially damaging in a scenario such as this season, where car performance is converging under a mature set of rules and additional performance is harder to find. Aerodynamic research is a process that requires repeatability: when gains are measured in fractions of a second, you have to test any given solution many different times to be sure of the results. If the tool itself is inconsistent, how can you be sure of your solutions?

The team is promising that developments are coming but, if correlation with the tools remains a problem, will these developments have the desired effect? Red Bull is clearly iterating on track, having lost faith in the tools, and its star driver is getting impatient.

And, if the problem with the tools is baked in – into decades-old concrete, no less – then even if Red Bull isn’t in crisis now, it soon will be as the vultures circle and Verstappen eyes the performance clause in his contract…