Red Bull F1 strife like Ducati MotoGP disaster of 13 winless years

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The struggles of Red Bull's litany of second drivers is similar to that faced by Ducati almost 20 years ago, as Karun Chandhok explains in this month's magazine

DUCATI RED BULL

Chandhok says Red Bull second car woes similar to Ducati in the '00s

Ducati / Red Bull

Since 2019, Red Bull has ploughed through Pierre Gasly, Alexander Albon, Sergio Perez and now Liam Lawson – each driver broken by the strain of trying to get their heads around an incredibly difficult car only Max Verstappen can master.

As former grand prix driver and Motor Sport columnist Karun Chandhok points out in this month’s edition, an eerily similar situation played out at Ducati’s MotoGP team almost 20 years ago.

“I saw the two-time MotoGP world champion Casey Stoner in Melbourne and the situation at Red Bull reminded me of his time at Ducati,” writes Chandhok.

“In 2007, only Stoner could win on the Desmosedici GP7, taking the title when his team-mates were nowhere close.

Casey Stoner Ducati Australia 2010

Stoner mastered the Ducati, while all his team-mates floundered

Ducati

“He left for Honda in 2011 and won a second championship; Ducati didn’t take another title until 2020.

“With Mercedes and Aston circling Max, Red Bull should be mindful of the Ducati example and create a package that more drivers can be successful in.”

From when the mercurial Stoner joined the team in 2007, he was partnered by Loris Capirossi, Marco Melandri and Nicky Hayden – none of them slouches, with the latter a former MotoGP champion.

As Chandhok pointed out, Stoner rocketed to the 2007 title and scored 20 victories in four years, while only Capirossi managed to win a race out of his team-mates. Melandri scored three top tens (in 18 races) while Hayden mustered just one podium in his season with Stoner, and five across five seasons at Ducati.

“However Rossi adapted his riding technique, he was tormented by lack of front-end feel”

While Stoner was dynamite on the Ducati, it was munching through other MotoGP professionals like no tomorrow.

The nightmare continued when MotoGP legend Valentino Rossi joined Ducati in Stoner’s place for two years from 2011.

Mat Oxley explained the Italian’s issues in a 2013 column: “However Rossi adapted his riding technique he was tormented by lack of front-end feel, understeer and furious power delivery.

“Front-end feel is vital in bike racing. If you can’t feel what the front tyre is doing in a corner you will be slow, or if you dare to push on, face dire consequences.”

“I don’t understand the feeling of the front… so I crash,” was how Rossi summed it up. “We more or less have the same problems we had when I first tested at the end of 2010.”

From the archive

The issues at Red Bull have also been at the front end of the car, but in a different way. In some aspects the recent iterations of Red Bulls have been suited to Verstappen, in others they haven’t.

What’s generally accepted is that until this year, when the team has tried to take the edge of the RB21, the cars have been extremely ‘pointy’ i.e. very sensitive to steering inputs: easy to oversteer, easy to spin.

Though this matched Verstappen’s rapid, aggressive style up to a point, even he said the cars were unbalanced, and that he was making up for a number of its deficiencies with his driving – papering over inherent flaws.

When Stoner was questioned in 2012 over why he could ride the Ducati but others couldn’t, his answer was somehow vague yet unequivocal. Yet the Australian admitted he too had to adapt.

“You’ve got to forget everything you think you know,” he said. “You can’t be proud in the slightest about what you think you can do and you have to ride the bike how it needs to be ridden. You’ve got to succumb to the bike.”

However, in later years Stoner did give some more detail on the Ducati Diaries podcast.

Max Verstappen Liam Lawson Red Bull

Only Verstappen can get his head around the Red Bull – Lawson is the latest victim

Red Bull

“It wasn’t, except for fourth, fifth gear, really good at anything,” he said.

“It didn’t go round the corners. It was pretty good under brakes, it was pretty stable under brakes.

“There’s a lesson to be learned for Red Bull and a warning to be heeded from Ducati’s wilderness years”

“But the first three gears, we’d just get absolutely eaten alive. So, any tracks that you come to where you really have to accelerate and pump out of the corners, we were gone, we really, really struggled.

“But we just tried to minimise the weaknesses and maximise its strengths. And everybody saw what it’s strengths were: its top speed, and with its stop speed we had some stable braking.

“So, we basically just tried to sit at the front of races as much as we could and make everybody else work for it, because if we didn’t qualify well or we weren’t at the front of the race early, it was very hard to chase people down because if they could get a few clean laps going it was very hard to make the most of that bike.”

After his championship year in 2007, Stoner wrestled on with the Ducati before moving to Honda in 2011, claiming one more title and then retiring the following year.

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After 2007, Ducati didn’t manage another championship triumph until 13 years later.

It was only when tech genius Luigi Dall’Igna came on board in 2013 and began ringing the Ducati changes that the Desmosedici – quite literally – began to turn around. It was still a long road to follow though: it took years of catching up with innovative solutions and sheer hard work to chip away at all the negatives, finally turning the Ducati into a race winner again.

“Step by step in recent years Ducati engineers have chipped away at the Desmosedici’s negatives – front-end feel and turning – without losing its positives – enormous straight-line performance and great braking stability,” wrote Oxley in 2021.

“There is little doubt that after almost two decades of trying, the Desmosedici is finally the best bike on the MotoGP grid.”

There’s a lesson to be learned for Red Bull and a warning to be heeded from Ducati’s wilderness years.

If Verstappen decides to move elsewhere, will Red Bull suffer the same fate as the Italian bike manufacturer did?

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