Formula 1 world champion Max Verstappen had a good feeling during the test drives with his Red Bull before the season and was surprised why the competition hadn’t caught up.
After the first races of the season, it didn’t look like the world championship fight would gain any momentum in the 2024 Formula 1 season. Max Verstappen had won four of the first five Grands Prix and was only stopped by a defect in Australia.
The pre-season test drives had already shown that Red Bull would have good early form. Because it was already clear to Fernando Alonso afterwards that 19 other drivers knew that they would not be world champion in 2024.
Even Verstappen had a good feeling after the test drives: “I didn’t understand why the rest of them were so slow,” he laughs in an interview with “Viaplay” and admits that he found it strange that Red Bull was still so far was ahead of the competition.
Max Verstappen: Tide turns in Miami
Although the team won all but one race in 2023, the last races before the break were definitely closer. “I really expected that the others would make big steps in the winter – or at least the same as us. But that wasn’t the case in the first four weekends,” says Verstappen.
However, you could already feel the smiles on Red Bull’s faces on the first day of testing, which Verstappen completed with a lead of more than 1.1 seconds over his pursuers. Of course, times on the first day of testing (and test drives in general) don’t play a particularly important role, but the feeling in the car was good at that point – and there were no problems.
What followed was pure dominance. Apart from the race in Australia, Red Bull achieved three one-two victories in the first four races. The smallest lead: 18 seconds.
This even led Mercedes Motorsport Director Toto Wolff to say that it was just a matter of who would be best of the rest. “But I think it was more because they weren’t strong at the time,” says Verstappen. “Because after that the tide turned quickly.”
Max Verstappen: The difficult search for the solution
In fact, the sixth race of the season in Miami is usually seen as a turning point because from then on Red Bull was no longer dominant and Verstappen did not cross the finish line as the winner for the first time. He won three of the next four races, but according to Red Bull it was mainly thanks to the Dutchman because they shouldn’t have won these races.
Many people are still wondering how Red Bull could lose their lead so suddenly. Verstappen is looking for an explanation: “Other people had big updates, and we had already done our update in Japan, so we were one step ahead – and then it got more difficult,” he says.
“The car became more difficult to drive, and if you are more at the limit, then of course it’s easier to have problems with the balance,” said Verstappen, who believes that Red Bull then developed in the wrong direction: “There were a lot of positive signals , but on the other hand the car became quite unstable.”
Of course Verstappen was looking for answers, “but it is very difficult to understand where it came from.”