Red Bull’s seesaw British GP heralds a fascinating 2024 F1 championship fight

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Sitting alongside Lewis Hamilton and Lando Norris after the British Grand Prix, part of Max Verstappen must have wondered how he’d managed to extend his Formula One championship lead.

For the first time since July 2022, Verstappen had gone two races without a victory. He failed to spoil the home party at Silverstone, splitting the two Brits on the podium with a second-place finish. His points advantage over Norris, who he overtook in the closing stages, still grew by three points.

A big turnaround from the first stint of Verstappen’s race. “It didn’t look great at one point,” Verstappen said. “I was really thinking we were going to finish fifth or sixth.”

The performance swings for Red Bull at Silverstone were extreme and a stark contrast from what we’ve known over the past couple of years. A lousy qualifying or tiny slip-ups were often more than made up for by a dominant car, particularly in Verstappen’s hands.

Going into the race day at Silverstone, the true pace of the Red Bull RB20 car remained unclear. Verstappen’s floor was, to quote team principal Christian Horner, “totally trashed” in qualifying after a run through the gravel. Despite the best efforts of Red Bull’s mechanics to patch it up, he still severely lacked downforce, making P4 on the grid an impressive effort from the Dutchman.

Even with a new floor fitted for the race, it became clear early on that Verstappen wasn’t going to charge into the lead. He slithered past Norris on the opening lap but couldn’t stay in touch with the Mercedes cars. As the end of the first stint neared and the rain loomed, Verstappen fell into the clutches of Norris, then the other McLaren of Oscar Piastri. Even Carlos Sainz started to close in his Ferrari.

“We were just falling off the back of that (fight),” Horner said, saying the speed difference was such that Verstappen could not even think about defending from the orange cars.

It was unusual territory for Red Bull, who pulled off two calls that successfully brought Verstappen back into contention.

The first was timing the switch onto intermediate tires when the main rain shower arrived mid-race. Red Bull had already rolled the dice with Sergio Pérez, who ran well outside of the points, and seen that backfire with the Mexican driver getting lapped by his teammate. With Verstappen, the team got it right. By coming in on Lap 26, one lap before Norris or the two Mercedes cars and two laps before Oscar Piastri, Verstappen vaulted back up to third and took a couple of seconds out of the leaders.

As the track dried out and neared being ready for slicks, Red Bull sensed a chance to get back in the hunt. “Suddenly, Max is the quickest car on the circuit again, so is then coming back at both the Mercedes and McLaren ahead,” Horner said. “So that was coming our way.”

Another smart pit call got Verstappen back within six seconds of the lead: Coming in to move from intermediates to slicks a lap before Norris, as well as taking hards instead of the softs of the cars ahead. He breezed past Norris, whose soft tires struggled to hold up in the closing stages, to grab second and finish just 1.4 seconds behind Hamilton.

As damage limitation goes, it was a good day for Verstappen. But he was direct about Red Bull’s proper level of performance, calling it “a poor afternoon” and that he “just didn’t have the pace today.”

True. And also not entirely true. Yes, Red Bull didn’t have the pace for over half the race. At the end of the first stint, it was the third-fastest (if not fourth-fastest) car. In that final stint, Verstappen was quicker than anyone. Given another lap or two, he could have been putting Hamilton under pressure for the win.

Horner said after the race there was “a lot to try and understand where the fluctuations are coming from.” He admitted to being baffled by Mercedes’ sudden surge in performance at Silverstone. “If anybody can explain the pace of their car in today’s race, they’d be doing very well,” Horner said. “Because it just seems to move around.”

His best explanation for the performance swings was down to the tires. Depending on the compound, conditions, and particularly the tire temperature, there can be huge swings in pace as each team tries to get into the peak operating window for maximum grip and performance. A race of sunshine and showers at Silverstone shifted that window a lot.

“It’s all about the tire working at a certain point in time, certain condition, whether it’s hot or cold,” Horner said. “Different cars work the tires in different ways, and you saw an extremity of that as the circuit went from damp to wet to damp to back to dry.”

The bigger picture for Red Bull is that, unlike last year or even the early part of the current season, it no longer has the pace advantage to mitigate those swings in performance in quite the same way. It has known for some time the field is closing in. Silverstone proved Red Bull can’t only worry about McLaren.

“Inevitably, when it closens, it’s down to the marginal fine details that make the difference,” Horner said. “The form’s moving around a bit. Mercedes were strong today. McLaren were strong last week. We won the week before in Barcelona.

“I think out of this triple-header, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Max has scored the most points.” Horner’s right. Verstappen’s haul of 61 points from Barcelona to Silverstone is six more than Hamilton’s, who is next-best at 55. Norris only scored 40 points in the same stretch due to his DNF in Austria.

It again shows that Verstappen remains incredibly hard to beat. Red Bull does face a serious headache over Pérez’s miserable form, which Horner admitted post-race was “unsustainable” as speculation grows over a possible mid-season switch as the constructors’ battle gets closer than preferred. “It’s something that we’re acutely aware of,” Horner said. “To win a constructors’ championship, you need both cars scoring.”

But so long as Verstappen keeps operating at such a high level, Red Bull will have confidence in its drivers’ championship push. The goal will be to try and understand how to exploit the fine margins now at the heart of the battle at the front if it is to take more of the good and less of the bad out of a topsy-turvy Sunday at Silverstone.

Top photo of Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen: Bryn Lennon/Formula 1 via Getty Images