Formula 1 cars are more evolutionary than revolutionary. They change as regulations are modified, tires are refreshed, they are born prematurely because they must be designed a semester or more before the wheels are put on the ground for the next championship, ideas emerge that are quickly spied on and copied to update them from race to race and they move within the hypotheses of aerodynamics, a very complex science that studies an invisible world like the air, into which they dive at more than 300 kilometers per hour.
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What happened to Red Bull in the last few races? Until recently, people were upset and bored because they won everything and now they are distressed because they don’t. Paradoxes of sports and their fans!
Given that budgets are controlled and assuming that their superiority was sustainable, Red Bull 2024 was not a major redesign but an update, saving study time and money for 2026, when there will be a complete change of rules and engines, at which time they will lose Honda’s machines in exchange for units of their own creation, together with Ford. In any case, just as 2024 and 2025 are and will be transitional championships without major inventions, enough differences may arise to overturn the order as has been seen in the rise of McLaren and Ferrari, to the detriment of Red Bull. The races are in kilometers per hour, but they are contested in meters per second and in that space, every millimeter of bodywork or engine breathing counts and they are won by those who make the fewest mistakes.
Max Verstappen
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What did McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes do? Optimising their platforms, but for those subtle fin adjustments to be seen on the stopwatch, the base has to be stable and decipherable for the engineers. The first two have done better and Mercedes are slipping because the car’s response is not consistent and they do not come from an effective predecessor. Red Bull fell into the field of mistakes in the set-up with more experimental emergency theories that their brilliant Verstappen has not managed to reconcile. This is why he has gone seven dates without a win, when the prediction at the beginning of the year was that he had no rivals in sight after winning almost in a row seven times in the first half of the year.
With all these innovations and changes, we have had a championship with seven different winners and very different profiles. Red Bull has won 7 of the 17 races, followed far behind by McLaren with 4, Mercedes and Ferrari with 3. However, in the overall standings for the first time McLaren is in the lead, thanks to the consistency of Lando Norris and the fantastic performances of Piastri, a position that the team had not occupied for 10 years and that, if maintained, could give it a ninth title among the constructors, after a drought that has accumulated no less than 26 years. And that is despite the fact that Adrian Neweyconsidered the best engineer in F1, was at its design table for eight seasons.
Max Verstappen
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Accustomed or subjected to consecutive F1 dominance by teams like Ferrari in Schumacher’s time, the seven by Mercedes courtesy of Hamilton and Rosberg, the same number by Red Bull contributed by Vettel, 4, and Verstappen, 3, the reappearance of McLaren in the fight is a fantastic surprise, especially considering that this team was 115 points behind when they ran the sixth of the 17 valid races in Miami.
Many explanations and hypotheses about the change revolve around Adrian Newey’s departure from Red Bull, in the midst of an internal crisis within the team whose collective atmosphere was affected. However, it should be noted that the car he is racing now was born on his desk and those of his engineers a year ago, because he does not do it alone. When announcing his retirement, work obligations in these areas of knowledge usually impose that he has a time of disconnection – called gardening – before starting at Aston Martin, his new challenge since mid-2025, and therefore he does not act on the corrective measures required by Verstappen and Pérez’s cars. In any case, if a car is born weak, with errors or few prospects for evolution, in addition to the fact that the data from the wind tunnel do not seem to coincide with the tracks, there is no Newey to correct it and even less so if he is not in the laboratory. Let us cite Mercedes’ woes in the last three years to illustrate the point.
It’s not all about Adrian. Let’s remember that his cars lost no less than seven consecutive championships against Mercedes and that it cannot be assured that his arrival at Aston Martin will turn a B-class car into a winner. Because while Newey designs and experiments in that team, the 2026 championship will already be underway and no one is ensuring that his vision of the new rules will hit the mark as it did in a crushing way with the Red Bulls that won three titles for Verstappen and four for Sebastian Vettel. In that complex laboratory, genius helps, but sometimes it also steps on the curbs as happened to Newey himself at McLaren when he designed the MP18 in 2003, which turned out to be so bad that it could not race even once and was shelved.
Max Verstappen, Red Bull driver.
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So, all that has been written and speculated about the effects on Red Bull and the future possibilities of Aston Martin under Newey, considered the best and most innovative designer in the history of F1, in which his full or total intervention in the cars has attributed him 12 constructors’ titles, 13 drivers’ titles, 532 podiums and 220 victories, is not an immediate or total guarantee, although it is an enormous advantage in technical thinking. When he was barely 30, Newey was already in F1 engineering with March (1988), then served at Williams (1991-1996), McLaren (1997-2005 and with Montoya in 2005 and 2006) and Red Bull in the last eight years. Impressive however you want to see it.
With and without Newey since the Miami race, the fifth of the year and premonitory won by McLaren with Norris, Red Bull would not be in deficit of points if Sergio Pérez had made the complement for the team’s points. His form declined to such an extent that he was sent to review his driving with Rob Wilson, the best driver coach in F1, architect of the talents of Räikkönen and Rosberg, both world champions, and coincidentally co-founder and advisor of the driving school operated by the Club Los Tortugas, in Tocancipá.
Max Verstappen
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The effects on the Mexican’s improved form in the last two outings are as noticeable as they are necessary for his future in the league, even though he unnecessarily got tangled up in the wheels of Sainz’s Ferrari on the streets of Baku, an accident that decapitated his team’s leadership to date.
All this series of contrasts between the successes of some and the overshadowing of others in terms of machinery puts the spotlight on new and young protagonists such as Lando Norris (24 years old) and Oscar Piastri (23) with their hands in the McLaren, Russell (26) above Hamilton (39), who is preparing his farewell year 2025 at Ferrari, of Leclerc, although he is no longer a rookie as he has seven seasons under his belt, but few years on earth, 26. That in F1 they already award, if not seniority, more than enough experience to carry the prestige and pressure of Ferrari, a brand to which he has contributed seven victories, a meager spoils for the 119 tests in the red cars, and of these one full of splendor in Monaco this year.
Will Red Bull and Verstappen’s streaks be broken, with the latter still comfortably ahead of Lando Norris? Will McLaren hold on to the lead? Will Mercedes and Ferrari win again?
Fortunately for the championship and F1, there is no right answer. It is only obvious that the number seven comes up everywhere and those are the valid ones that are missing.
JOSE CLOPATOFSKY
Director of MOTOR
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