So far this season we are seeing another manifestation of how Max Verstappen is extracting lap time from a difficult car in a way which has proved impossible for a team-mate.

But with this car it’s not quite the same as in the Gasly, Albon or Perez years when the Red Bull’s trickiness was in its super-responsive front end and how they struggled to keep control of the rear. This car, as Verstappen has several times explained, is quite well balanced but just slow. It doesn’t have that super-agile corner rotation into slow turns and instead getting the best from it involves loading up the car progressively, feeling when the rear is about to step out and anticipating that via his inputs on the steering, brakes and throttle. It’s still all about sensitivity and feel but expressed in a different way because of the traits of the RB21.

It’s simply not super-fast at the moment, relative to the competition

This is just a further development of the direction the team headed in after Monza last year when a breakthrough was made in understanding why the car had lost its balance as more downforce was added with development. As the front:rear aero bias (the centre of pressure) under braking moved quickly forward (helping create that great front end response which Verstappen exploits so well) so it was creating ever-more problems as the car’s underfloor and bodywork was developed to give more downforce. Because as the braking was released into the corner, the aero bias was moving rearwards again too fast, making for lap time-sapping mid-corner understeer.

Once this was understood, the planned further developments were scrapped and a new short-notice round of upgrades were on the car by Austin, which did improve it. In going further in this direction with the RB21, preventing the aero bias moving rearwards too fast once the brakes are released, it seems some of the corner entry alacrity has been lost. The challenge now is having the sensitivity to feel when the rear can or can’t accept full load and adjusting your inputs accordingly. Max being Max, he has adapted to it immediately. But it’s simply not super-fast at the moment, relative to the competition.

This is essentially Red Bull being forced out of its previous development direction, having found that road becoming increasingly rocky. Meanwhile some others, in following their own more fruitful direction, have surpassed Red Bull. Now McLaren’s sophisticated temperature management and great ride have given it access to a lot of more usable performance and it’s the new gold standard. Red Bull is now many months behind as it follows this new direction.

The recognition of Red Bull being headed in the wrong development direction last year was delayed by Verstappen’s brilliance. The more true indicator was probably Sergio Perez’s sudden drop-off in form from around the time of the Imola updates.

All of this has made for a very real prospect of Verstappen despairing of the situation and moving elsewhere. So his own brilliance has brought about the car shortfalls which might see him move. That’s not attributing blame to him. It’s more an oversight from the technical team in not seeing or believing the pattern and what it might mean. Easy to say in hindsight.

But the process whereby a driver’s skills can impact negatively on a team’s longer-term prospects is not unique, merely unusual.  There are parallels with Ayrton Senna at McLaren, though the mechanism was slightly different. McLaren boss Ron Dennis later claimed that the financial drain of meeting the value Senna placed on his unique skills meant the team did not invest in new technology as heavily as it should have done, as Williams was forcing the technological pace and not paying its drivers Senna-like salaries.