Lando Norris, McLaren, Singapore, 2024

Red Bull not quick enough to fight McLaren on normal tracks yet – Verstappen

Formula 1

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Max Verstappen says Red Bull need to bring more improvements to their car in order to challenge McLaren at the majority of grand prix venues.

Following a series of poor races, Red Bull made clear progress with their car in Singapore. At the track where they endured by far their worst performance of 2023, Verstappen was second only to Lando Norris in qualifying.

Although Verstappen acknowledged that street tracks are likely to remain the RB20’s weakness, he says they still need to find more to challenge McLaren at more conventional circuits.

“We still need to figure out the base pace, the long run pace a bit more,” he told the official F1 channel. “We know that, of course, this track is not ideal for us, but I think even on a normal track at this stage, we still can’t fight them so we need to bring more performance.”

Verstappen fell up to half a minute behind Norris at one stage, but finished the race 20 seconds behind the McLaren. He said it became clear soon after the start he didn’t have the pace to challenge Norris.

“Quite quickly I realised that it was not possible to follow and I just tried to do my own race and just keep my momentum going, even though, of course, it was not the same pace as Lando,” he said.

“The first stint was a bit difficult. I had a lot of rear deg[radation], a lot of sliding. That’s just cost me a lot of lap time.

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“Then the second set was a little bit more competitive. It’s still not of course where we want to be, but I think overall it was a bit more promising.”

He said the scale of his deficit to Norris “wasn’t really a surprise because the balance that I had at one point in that person was not really nice – I was losing a lot of lap time just on myself.

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said they had made clear gains with their car after their struggles since the summer break.

“If you consider where we were a few weeks ago the progress is visible, and we have the better part of a month to put our heads down and make some progress before we head to Austin,” he said. “There will be a lot of late nights in Milton Keynes.”

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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4 comments on “Red Bull not quick enough to fight McLaren on normal tracks yet – Verstappen”

  1. What is “normal”?

    1. I suppose non-street tracks.

  2. Significant improvement indeed, verstappen should be satisfied of this car, considering they usually didn’t impress at singapore, and verstappen himself did a great job to take 2nd place.

  3. BLS (@brightlampshade)
    24th September 2024, 10:37

    Singapore was a weird race, the top three were almost a pitstop away from each other. The McLaren seems able to push its tyres for longer but really isn’t happy in traffic. If Max can maintain this form till December then I’m sure he’ll be satisfied, that’ll wrap up the title with ease.

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