'The car came alive' – Red Bull clinging to magic Shanghai stint

“My focus was just on myself, because I didn’t really expect to have any kind of battle, to be honest,” he said. “Honestly, I just expected how the first stint played out, to just drop off if I would just stick to my own pace, and that’s what I did.

“But yeah, a bit positively surprised, I would say, in the second stint. It gives us a bit more hope, and probably a direction as well to look into.

“Of course, it’s still not where we want to be, if you compare it to McLaren especially. But at least we were a bit more competitive in I would say a difficult weekend.”

Verstappen himself had no answers as to why the car suddenly worked so well in that second stint. He played down suggestions that cooler temperatures or the fuel load going down were key factors.

“It’s a good question. It’s a few things that might be the case. But I prefer to first look with the team into that, before we draw any conclusions.

“It wasn’t that much cooler, a bit more overcast, but beginning of the race, I think it was very similar. So I don’t think it’s in the temperatures of the ambient or the track.

“I honestly don’t think it’s related to fuel per se. I might be wrong, but I don’t think so. The handling is exactly the same.

“It’s just I have more tyre grip, because before just nothing was responding, and at the end, at least there was more response. So that’s something that we need to understand.”

The Milton Keynes engineering team will spend the days before the next race in Japan looking for some answers.

Horner agreed that the way the car improved between stints in Shanghai provided some useful clues, and suggested that there is still some potential in the RB21.

“There was obviously a significant difference,” the team boss explained. “On the medium, he came in the pits 18 seconds behind the race leader. By the end of the race, he was 16 seconds behind. And in the meantime, he caught both Ferraris and passed Charles Leclerc. So I think the car was in a better window on the harder tyre.”

The challenge now is to understand just why Verstappen found a sweet spot, and how the team can ensure that the car gets into that window on a regular basis.

“Particularly in the last third of the race, Max got a feeling,” said Horner. “The car came alive, and he was pretty much the quickest car on the circuit in that last third of the race.

“So there’s a lot for us to take away and understand. I think we know we need to put performance on the car. It’s the second race in succession where the latter part of the race has been better for us.

“We leave the first two races eight points behind in the drivers’ championship. We know we’ve got performance to find. The whole team’s working very hard, very focused on that.

“I think we’ve taken a lot of information out of this weekend, and obviously now with a two-week gap to Japan we need to try and make sure we come back fighting hard there.”

Horner conceded that it’s impossible to say what steps can be taken by the next event in Suzuka, and how any short-term lessons translate to the track remains to be seen.

“We know the areas that we’re working on,” he said. “Obviously, we’ll keep looking to bring performance to the car, and we’ll find out in two weeks. We’ve got a lot of information, a lot of data and feedback from the driver on the second stint, we’ll have a look at the lap times last third of the race.

“You even look at his last lap, it was very competitive. Why was it competitive? What drove that competitiveness? What does he need in terms of switching on the grip? It’s not a balance issue so much that he’s struggling with, it’s just extracting more from the car.”

“McLaren proved that you can have a troubled start but still be very competitive” Christian Horner

McLaren is flying at the moment, and it’s logical to assume that the title race is destined to be about Norris v Piastri.

However it’s a long season, with the challenge of switching of R&D focus to 2026 hanging over everyone. It’s still too early for us to write-off Verstappen’s chances of taking the fight to the Woking team – and if the McLaren drivers take points off each other the door could be left open should Red Bull find more pace.

In that sense having one competitive car scoring all the time can pay off, but for the bigger picture Lawson’s current form does not help. Trying to find ways to make him more comfortable will also drain engineering resources from the overall quest to make the package faster.

“Never say never,” says Horner of his team’s 2025 prospects. “The one thing that McLaren proved to everybody last year is that you can have a troubled start to the year but still be very competitive.

“And look, we’re eight points behind in the drivers’. The constructors’ championship is a very tough ask, and we need to make significant progress with the car in order to even challenge for that.

“And you have to have two cars scoring, that obviously hurt us badly last year in the constructors’. And even to compete for the drivers’, you’ve got to have another car in play.

“So it’s vitally important for the team to ensure that we have both drivers running as close to the front as we can.”

“I think we’ve got a reasonable basis. We were 0.17sec off pole, and we were as quick in the second stint as a McLaren.

“So we know there’s areas where we need to improve the car, and there’s a road map of development that is planned now. Obviously we’re trying to make sure that develops what we need in terms of lap time, to really find a little bit more pace and put a lot of pressure on the McLarens ahead, but they’re not that far ahead.”

He downplayed the suggestion that the Red Bull might be the fourth fastest team at the moment: “I think it’s all subjective to the day that you’re on. The McLarens are the benchmark. They’ve won the first two races.”

“I know that this season is going to be a tough fight” Max Verstappen

The world champion himself remains positive. He knows that beyond this season Red Bull’s prospects are hazy at best, with the new in-house Ford power unit coming, and without Adrian Newey guiding the overall aero and chassis concept. There remains speculation that he could move on as early as 2026.

That situation puts even more of a premium on finding whatever small margins might put him properly in the title hunt this season, but he conceded that it’s hard to judge how much the car can be improved by the next race.

“It’s impossible to say, because it might not,” said Verstappen. “We just keep working. We just have to stick together, push hard. That’s what we all do. I know that the team is working flat out. I never doubted that anyway, so we just keep on trying to improve.

“I know that this season is going to be a tough fight, a tough battle to even be up there. But we just have to work. It’s as simple as that.”