Things are restless at Red Bull, but Max Verstappen is starting the season at the front again

Max Verstappen appears to be able to win his fourth world title in complete comfort on Saturday during the Bahrain Grand Prix. He starts from the first starting spot, as everyone had predicted. With the previous dominant season in mind, in which Verstappen won nineteen of the 22 grands prix, you can easily imagine the scenario for the race. The Red Bull with starting number 1 comes through the first corner in the lead, disappears over the horizon and the driver is listening to the Wilhelmus music an hour and a half later.

But it is not guaranteed that things will be comfortable in the near future. Not for Verstappen, who could simply have the competition closer behind him than expected. And not for his team Red Bull Racing either, where the unrest of the past few weeks has all but ended.

While Verstappen secured the first pole position of the 2024 season on Friday, the F1 paddock was talking about someone else: Verstappen’s team boss Christian Horner. The fifty-year-old Briton was cleared of misconduct on Wednesday, when the F1 teams were setting up shop in Bahrain. A female team member had accused him of this, but an external lawyer hired by the Red Bull parent company concluded that Horner had done nothing wrong and could therefore stay on.

Google Drive folder

If Red Bull had hoped that the fuss surrounding Horner would die down afterwards, the team was faced with a disappointment on Thursday. During the second free practice, all journalists with permanent F1 accreditation, team bosses and other important figures received an email with a link to a Google Drive folder. The content: almost eighty alleged screenshots of the app conversations between Horner and the woman who accuses him of misconduct. NRC also has the material, which is incriminating for Horner, in his hands.

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The sender of the email was anonymous, and the authenticity of the screenshots is difficult to determine; After all, WhatsApp conversations are easy to spoof. The leak does raise a number of questions, for example about the origin of some selfies and private photos and videos of Horner that are in the folder, and partly also appear in the chats. The images do not appear to show any signs of manipulation and, according to various tools, were not created by AI – but in themselves they do not constitute evidence of inappropriate behavior.

What also remains completely unclear is who sent the email, how that person obtained the material and why this person apparently wants Horner gone. And it is equally mysterious how the mysterious sender obtained the complete list of email addresses of the F1 journalists.

Horner responded a few hours after the email was sent. “I do not comment on anonymous speculation, but again I have always denied the allegations,” a spokesperson on behalf of Horner said. to press representatives at the circuit. “I have always cooperated with the investigation. It was a thorough and fair investigation by an external specialist, and the conclusion was that the complaint is dismissed.”

A few hours before qualifying, Horner sat down with successive Formula 1 CEO Stefano Domenicali and chairman Mohammed Ben Sulayem of the FIA ​​motorsport association. Journalists on the spot report that the affair was discussed, even though the agreements had already been included in the agenda.

Domenicali and Ben Sulayem can do little to change the issue, which is for the time being an internal matter of Red Bull. In the meantime, irritation in the paddock is increasing: after the CEO of Red Bull’s future partner Ford had previously expressed his dissatisfaction with what he saw as the slow and non-transparent handling of the investigation, Horner’s colleagues also made themselves heard in Bahrain. Toto Wolff of Mercedes believes that Red Bull should offer “more transparency”, McLaren director Zak Brown mentions all speculation surrounding Horner “not healthy for the sport”.

Frowned eyebrows

During qualifying, Horner sat on the pit wall again. On the other side, on the circuit, the whole controversy apparently had no influence on the 26-year-old Verstappen. In his new Red Bull RB20, he opened a gap of more than two-tenths of a second with number two Charles Leclerc (Ferrari).

The unveiling of the RB20 in mid-February raised eyebrows among F1 followers. The car looks strikingly different from its predecessor, especially because of the large ‘shoulders’ that run from the cockpit over the hood to the rear. Also the side podsthe protrusions on either side of the car, smaller than before, with inlets for air cooling shrunk to tiny slits.

These external differences indicate that Red Bull has shown courage at the drawing board. Teams that build successful cars generally continue to develop the same design concept, so that there are not too big differences between successive cars.

Red Bull has not tackled it that way now. The team admits that it consciously opted for a different approach. “When you take a new direction, you come up with new ideas,” said technical director Pierre Waché last week. against Motorsport. “First of all, you know that you have to improve a lot, because others are chasing you. Secondly, you know that with the previous concept you would at some point hit a plateau in what you can achieve with it.”

Waché is right, because while the F1 cars all looked quite different two years ago when the current technical regulations were introduced, they are now starting to look very similar again. The competition is trying to incorporate the discoveries that made the RB18 and RB19 so quickly into their own designs. By taking a new direction now, Red Bull hopes to stay one step ahead of the other teams.

Only the Red Bull technicians know what exactly the purpose of the innovations on the RB20 is, and how they make the car faster. But experts that were present at the tests in Bahrain last week, saw that the parts under the hood – such as the cooling radiators in the side pods – have been placed a lot more efficiently, so that the body can be folded more tightly around them. All this together could provide all kinds of advantages: less air resistance, wings that generate downforce more effectively, or better weight distribution and therefore better driving behavior in the bends.

Distorted picture

Whatever it may be, Verstappen’s pole position seems at first glance to indicate that he will have just as dominant a season with his thoroughly renewed car as in 2023. In reality, however, it is still too early to draw that conclusion.

The result of the qualification also provides a somewhat distorted picture. Indeed, Verstappen drove the fastest lap time with 1.29.179 in Q3, the third and decisive part of qualifying. But number two Charles Leclerc was slightly faster in the second part, which does not determine the starting order, with 1.29.165. Moments later he was unable to repeat that performance at the decisive moment in Q3, partly due to a small moment of upset halfway through his lap.

It is also clear after qualifying that the field behind Verstappen is unprecedentedly close. There was only 0.3 seconds between number two Leclerc and number nine, Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton. With such margins, no one can afford a mistake – not even Verstappen.

Ferrari can also take hope that it appears to have remedied its major weakness of 2023. During the qualifications, in which everything revolves around driving one ultimate lap, the red cars were still quite strong in 2023: they defeated Red Bull six times. But in the races, over much longer distances, they invariably suffered from excessive tire wear. Time and again the Ferraris dropped back, usually finishing somewhere in fifth, sixth or seventh place.

During the test drives, also in Bahrain, there were hopeful sounds from the Ferrari camp last week about tire wear. During longer runs, intended to simulate this Saturday’s race, Leclerc and Sainz drove almost the same lap times at the end as at the start: a sign that the tires were wearing much less. The lap times were also quite daring compared to those of Red Bull, although this does not necessarily mean much during tests.

In that respect, the long runs that the teams performed during free practice on Thursday were perhaps more meaningful. Then Verstappen was the fastest again. So it is certainly not impossible that he will still drive away from the rest of the field on Saturday.

Correction (March 1, 2024): In an earlier version of this piece, the sentence was “Domenicali and Ben Sulayem can do little to change the issue, which is for the time being an internal matter of Red Bull.” the word ‘little’ has been omitted. That has been corrected.

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