2025 Oracle Red Bull Racing F1 Team

[Cs98]

It wont help Liam's career if he decides to defeat Max. I dont even think the garage will give him a setup or strategy to do so.

As if a F1 team would deliberately slow a car down. If that would be the case they would have allowed Perez some better setups more often..

They wont slow him down. I think his side of the garage just wont be allowed to outsmart the other side. Be that with tyre prep, hiding aces for Liam to use in Q3, or strategy.
If Liam sees a development path, it just wont be entertained.
Redbull did this last year. Newey revealed this.
Perez from his experience knew the car wasn't right. The team didn't really put resources into pursuing these concerns. So it's not a case from slowing down one guy, it's more like not providing the resources to making him faster. Because why make him get closer to the #1?
The drawback of this approach is it puts all the eggs in one basket and that development path may not be the best.
Teams like ferrari and mercedes split the proirities between the two drivers. So that yeilds more relevant data and reduces the risk of the the development direction.

Max was driving the car that was given and continued down a path that did make him much faster than Perez. So that was okay to him.
However it was making an issue worse that he soon detected many races down into the season.

Liam's addition should make things interesting. He is younger than Max, and not set in any mold like a Perez, a Hulk, Ricciardo. He will work with what the team gives him, but his outspoken personality may at some point find issue with his ideas not being given priority.

I think Max beats him handily. But Liam may outqualify max 1 to 3 times. He should have a lot of raw pace and energy at 22 years old. I expect a few wtf! moments as well between the two on track especially of Liam on a different strategy not moving out of the way of Max or even on a lap 1 start where he could get a better launch but doesnt want to give Max room to get ahead and build a gap.
Tsunoda may get a surprice appearance if Liam goes rogue.

I think you tell a story to fit your narrative but it doesn't really follow reality. Verstappen was open about the problems with the car for a long time, it was in fact him who said that some people on the technical side were ignoring the extent of the car issues. He was pushing for change publicly long before RB themselves admitted there was an issue with the concept. He was absolutely not okay with it.

As far as the whole "Max was getting faster whilst Checo wanted to change the car". Max beats Checo in any car as teammates. Max does not beat every other team in any car, he needs a competitive car to win. If the concept is going in the wrong direction and the team is losing competitiveness, he's not thinking "great, I'm outqualifying Checo by 8 tenths in this really difficult car whilst Lando is winning the race, this is all I want from F1". He wants the best car all the time, if there's a problem he will call it out. He's not sitting there directing the team to make a difficult car to beat the brakes off Checo

[Rikhart]

Ah yes, Lawson will beat Max, because he has all the energy of youth, at 22 years old. How can Max compete with that, being the dinossaur that he is?

[Espresso]

It wont help Liam's career if he decides to defeat Max. I dont even think the garage will give him a setup or strategy to do so.

As if a F1 team would deliberately slow a car down. If that would be the case they would have allowed Perez some better setups more often..

They wont slow him down. I think his side of the garage just wont be allowed to outsmart the other side. Be that with tyre prep, hiding aces for Liam to use in Q3, or strategy.
If Liam sees a development path, it just wont be entertained
….

No secrets in the RB garage. Remember Perez appreciating the open acces to Max his data?
Max doesn‘t like politics. Hè just wants the fastest car. His ability to ‚Drive around the Problem‘ just hid the problems to the public.

[carisi2k]

I would say if the rb20 he is talking about is the brazil or qatar level pf performance then there is nothing to worry about.

Brazil level of performance is Max Verstappen it couldn't rain 20 races sadly.

Melbourne might be wet actually.

[Alexf1]

Is The-Race reading this thead? Article about how Lawson could stack up to Max coming season knowing how his predecessors did:
https://www.the-race.com/formula-1/red- ... erstappen/

[hollus]

Adding a readable title or summary to that naked link, would be nice.

Edit: and it was then added. Thanks.

[Curbstone]

It wont help Liam's career if he decides to defeat Max. I dont even think the garage will give him a setup or strategy to do so.

As if a F1 team would deliberately slow a car down. If that would be the case they would have allowed Perez some better setups more often..

Redbull did this last year. Newey revealed this.
Perez from his experience knew the car wasn't right. The team didn't really put resources into pursuing these concerns. So it's not a case from slowing down one guy, it's more like not providing the resources to making him faster. Because why make him get closer to the #1?
The drawback of this approach is it puts all the eggs in one basket and that development path may not be the best.
Teams like ferrari and mercedes split the proirities between the two drivers. So that yeilds more relevant data and reduces the risk of the the development direction....

That's a wrong conclusion. It should be; why spend resources to make the car easier to drive when this will also mean the car will become slower. So the result will that the championship leader, who doesn't have problem with the car will get a slower car so that the number 6 in the championship will have less trouble with the car? Do you want to trade a 1st and 6th position for a 2nd and 3rd (at best)?

[zeroday]

Do you want to trade a 1st and 6th position for a 2nd and 3rd (at best)?

Yes, a team would (and should) prefer that tradeoff because statistically, that would earn the team what ALL teams truly covet: The WCC. All things being equal, 1st + 6th in points is smaller than 2nd + 3rd, no?

[venkyhere]

yet another article to chew on, as we have 10 more days for the first race : https://www.planetf1.com/news/pierre-wa ... evaluation

But, having managed to right the ship during last season, how confident is Waché of having been able to figure out where the correlation issues stemmed from and, as a result, been able to compensate for them?

“I’m not confident,” he bluntly said.

“But, at some point, you have to use the tools you have and take all the information you can to make some decision.

“We still have, and I think everybody has… not correlation, but you need some extrapolation of what will happen in your tools to the track.

“It is a part of the engineering job we are doing. The confidence is, I don’t think it is 100 percent, but it is not a show stopper.

“You have to use what you know, what you control, and make sure that the extrapolation works as much as possible, and improve the way you operate in your tools.”

If this guy is being truthful, 2025 will be worse than 2024 and no chance for even WDC.
If this guy is bluffing, 2025 will be an intense battle at the front and the closest season in the history of F1.

[Sergej]

I think he's not bluffing and it's plenty expectable to have little to no chance for WDC (let alone WCC).

[pantherxxx]

When Waché says the car is only 0.3 to 0.4 seconds faster than the previous year’s car, he’s likely referring to peak performance in ideal conditions, such as one-lap qualifying pace or optimal race pace on fresh tires. However, over a full stint, the improvement could be significantly larger due to better tire management and consistency.

The previous car (RB20) had higher peak potential but was tricky to drive and degraded tires quickly.
The new car, while less extreme in peak performance, may keep its lap times more consistent over 20-30 laps, resulting in a much bigger overall time gain over a race stint.

Lawson did super consistent lap times during the race sim actually.

This means that while it may only be 0.3-0.4s faster on fresh tires, by lap 15 or 20, it could be 1+ second faster per lap compared to the RB20, which may have already started to struggle.

[Valencia2012]

On twitter Dr obbs showed a graph where on some tracks(Mexico and Spa) RB lost 0.8 tenths to a second compared to the quickest oppositon a year before Only Qatar was had a positive swing compared to the year before. As mentioned by obbs, RB has a big mountain to climb for this season. The more i read the less confident i get about his season.

[Wouter]

There is nice news today about Max. It can be seen in the WEC thread.

[Wouter]

How F1 Drivers Prepare For A New Season | Behind The Charge

Watch along for exclusive footage of Liam’s first time driving an F1 car in 2025, Max’s seat fit at our Campus in Milton Keynes,
and behind the scenes of getting the RB21 out on track for the first time at pre-season Testing in Bahrain!




And a long article about Liam in GQ Australia:

https://www.gq.com.au/gq-sports/liam-la ... 5e1db69bf6

[organic]

Verstappen, asked by Viaplay during an event at Zandvoort whether he can compete for GP victory at Melbourne:

"[There is still] too much work to be done for that,” said the four-time world champion of Red Bull Racing

And

According to Verstappen, the McLaren team is currently the big favorite for the world title. According to him, the British team is in a class of its own. "We had hoped to be closer. But that is not the case yet," said Verstappen.

Speaking about new car characteristics, Verstappen explains that they may not have improved kerbs/bumps handling much. How unfortunate.

“In terms of balance, I feel a bit better now when I enter the corners and in the middle of the corners . But, on the other hand, there are still problems with the kerbs and the bumps . Those things are obviously not our strong points and I keep hammering on them. Obviously, you don't always have to say that to the outside world, but in the meetings it is obviously discussed a lot .”

And here are all of the quotes that gpblog has published

"I don't think we can fight for the win in melbourne, but hopefully we can make improvements in a few races.”

“it’s never good enough of course, but i think we expected a little bit more from it ourselves.”

"after the test you do have time to go through the data and come to some conclusions. i think it can be fine-tuned a bit more in melbourne. but like i said, i think we still have some things to improve

"on the other hand, i think we have some ideas on how to improve the car.”

I'm not expecting Verstappen or red bull to fight for the title this year honestly

https://www.telegraaf.nl/sport/12144294 ... -de-winkel

By Erik van Haren

And final few quotes from here https://x.com/SCUDERIAFEMBOY/status/189 ... N7wWw&s=19 and here https://www.gpblog.com/en/news/330785/m ... -test.html

https://autoracer.it/it/verstappen-mcla ... -australia