F1 | Incredible Red Bull: Now Verstappen is also starting to be missed

What’s happening to Max Verstappen? It’s well known that Red Bull is not going through a good moment, but until the eve of the trip to Azerbaijan the only certainty has always been the ability of its star man to gather the maximum possible.

In Baku, even this confidence began to falter. It had been over a year since Max had a weekend with a lower performance than his teammate, to the point of igniting the fuse of the conspiracy theorists who accused Red Bull of bringing two different cars onto the track in favor of the world champion. If that is the case, in Baku they switched the cars…

Red Bull admitted that something didn’t work in the setup chosen after FP3 on Verstappen’s car. “We will have a big debriefing,” admitted Christian Horner, “we need to understand why such small differences between the two cars had such an impact in terms of performance. It was clear that today Max wasn’t as comfortable with the car as Checo.”

“We paid the price for a change made before qualifying,” confirmed Verstappen. “In the race I found myself with a car that jumped a lot, in the low-speed corners the wheels came off the ground, and when you reduce the rubber surface in contact with the asphalt it becomes very difficult.”

Verstappen did not attribute blame: “You win and you lose as a team, we thought it would be a good direction to take and in the end it wasn’t”. The biggest surprise is that a wrong choice came in a weekend that started much better than the previous ones. “It’s true,” Max admitted, “but you always try to improve the car, only unfortunately we made it worse”. Without a dominant single-seater like in the last two seasons, Red Bull is also exposed to mistakes, and this is an alarm bell that rang loudly in Milton Keynes.

Having lost the lead in the Constructors’ Championship, Red Bull is now fearing that bad news could also arrive in the Drivers’ Championship, where Verstappen has a 59-point advantage over Norris. “Singapore? We need to understand what we did wrong here,” Verstappen commented. “I don’t think it will be our best track, of course, but we’ll see. It could surprise us. The Constructors’ Championship? The fight is not over yet. We’ll try to recover.”

What is most alarming for Milton Keynes is the insertion of Ferrari and Mercedes into the gap that separates it from McLaren. Three weeks ago, in Zandvoort, the 22-second gap that separated Max from Norris at the chequered flag was untouched, and Verstappen ended the weekend with 18 points. In Baku, the same margin (over leader Piastri before the Perez-Sainz incident) was occupied by Leclerc, Perez, Sainz, Russell and Norris.

In such a scenario, even the points haul that should allow Verstappen to keep world championship anxiety at bay today is no longer a guarantee, considering that there are still seven Grands Prix (plus three sprint races) to go until the end of the season.

The accident between Carlos Sainz and Sergio Perez two laps from the end

At the end of the race, Horner wanted to highlight Perez’s weekend, returning to an excellent level of performance after more than a year. “It was frustrating to see Checo finish the weekend without points,” admitted the Red Bull team principal. “I think he could have even won the race today. When he came back out on new tyres after the pit stop, Lando slowed him down to allow Oscar to maintain his position after the pit stop, and without that help Checo would have slipped behind Leclerc, with a good chance of overtaking him. It’s very frustrating, as is the incident that eliminated him from the race. You can see quite clearly that Carlos looks in the mirror and simply moves to the left knowing that Checo was there…”