F1 | Red Bull: Verstappen fails to tame the RB20 on the curbs

At the end of qualifying in Monaco, an engineer from a team opposing Red Bull threw it out there: “The curbs should be raised on all the tracks!”. The joke was not out of place given that shortly afterwards Verstappen himself analyzed the problems experienced by Red Bull on Saturday in Monegasque: “In the second sector we are doing badly, and this is because I can’t use the curbs. If I touch them, the behavior of the car ends up becoming unpredictable, difficult to manage, and not being able to use the curbs on tracks like this means wasting a lot of time.”

The most surprising news on Saturday in Monaco was seeing the two Red Bulls in sixth and eighteenth position. There are no penalties involved, but it is simply the result of a troubled qualifying. Already from the first tests yesterday Verstappen and Perez complained about the excessive rigidity of the car. “We tried everything – explained Max – but the car is like a go-kart, the feeling you get when driving it is that of not having suspension, it doesn’t absorb shocks on the curbs or on the roughness of the asphalt”.

It is not the first time that Red Bull has experienced problems on street circuits. The last time we raced on a real ‘street circuit’ (Singapore 2023) it was more or less the same thing. “We have had this problem since 2022 – explained Max – but on other occasions he has been masked by the overall superiority of the car. Now that our opponents have caught up, our weakness becomes clear, and it’s not something you can fix in a few weeks. This machine was supposed to fix this problem, but obviously it didn’t.”

Verstappen describes a situation bordering on disastrous, but at the end of the first ‘run’ of Q3 he was in third position, a tenth and a half behind Leclerc. Then the mistake (yes, a mistake by Verstappen!) with the last set of tires at the entrance to St. Devote.
“I can say that I was surprised for a long time by the position we maintained during qualifying – admitted Max – I tried to adapt in every possible way, but if the car suddenly gets away from you without warning there is little you can do. I’m not disappointed with my laps, but we are P18 and P6, and Checo is very good on street circuits. What to say? From a certain point of view I can’t be disappointed with sixth position.” In hindsight Verstappen could have been satisfied with a place in the Top3, or at least on the second row, but with a different approach Max would not have obtained pole and victory at Imola.

Helmut Marko was hoping for a front row before qualifying. “We were fast in the first sector – he explained – but we lost two or three tenths in the second. This led Max to have to take maximum risks in the first section to gain the greatest possible advantage, luckily the data showed that the collision did not damage the car.”

One of the aspects that most alarmed the Red Bull technicians was that the problems seen in Monaco had not emerged to their full extent during work on the simulator. “We drive them over curbs without any problems – revealed Marko – here, in the real world, I can use Max’s expression: we jump like kangaroos. And it is something that has already partially emerged both in Miami and Imola. Then, on tracks like Barcelona we don’t expect any problems.”

Now, however, we have to face the 78 laps scheduled for tomorrow in Monte Carlo. Red Bull is looking for a way to limit the damage especially in the Constructors’ classification, where the Ferrari threat could become something more real than expected.