What is going on at Red Bull?

The two Red Bull cars have had a very slow start this season. Whether it’s with reliability issues or with mistakes that they’re making. Max Verstappen has struggled to get off of the line all weekend in China. Isack Hadjar had a spin on the first lap when fighting Ollie Bearman and it didn’t really fully recover. This leaves people to question what is going on inside Red Bull and why is their car so slow this year?

To try and see what is going on, we have to look back at qualifying in Australia. Max Verstappen had a spin in Q1 that led to him being knocked out. This was probably a team issue as Max Verstappen said in his interview before the race that “loads of things went wrong with the car and they were too complicated to explain the TV.” from what we could see on TV we could see that all the breaking went onto the rear axels leading the brake distribution, not to be weighed out enough and causing the car to spin. Was able to recover to P6. If he did not spin, he could’ve been challenging for a podium.

Isack Hadjar had a really great qualifying in Australia and finished P3 behind the two Mercedes. While everything look good during qualifying and it seemed like Hadjar could try and get a win after his great start off the line coming up to P2. He was forced to retire due to his car having technical issues in the engine. The car seemed pretty quick, it had many reliability issues and that is a massive effect on the drivers.

Red Bull came into China optimistic after Hadjar’s qualifying and Verstappen’s pace in the race.

All that optimism was cut short when they qualified P8 and P9 in sprint qualifying. This meant that one of their drivers could start in the points. They still have a chance to score at least in the Sprint. However, Verstappen was really slow off the line and fell down to P12. Hadjar was battling Antonelli and the two had a come together ruining Hadjars race. So that meant neither a Red Bull driver scored points in sprint.

In qualifying for the race, the Red Bulls need to prove that the sprint was just a fluke. This started off alright as both drivers easily made it through to Q2. However, it turned sour for them, after Hadjar barely made it out of Q2 by 0.002 of a second. It was the same story for Max Verstappen who barely made it out by nearly 3/10 of a second. After that little scare the Red Bulls had the chance to try and shoot for top five at least. However, they cannot beat out the midfield teams and qualified in P8 and P9. This is when fans began to real realize that Red Bull is slow this year.

During the race, however, they didn’t seem as slow as people thought. Hadjar had a spin while fighting with Oliver Bearman, and that nearly cost him his race as he fell to last for a little while. Max Verstappen yet again had a slow start off the line and fell all the way down the grid where he was battling with a few midfield teams. Hadjar was able to recover his race and finish P8. However, for Verstappen, he was able to recover and was in an intense battle with Oliver Bearman for a lot of the race, but had to retire after the 46 laps due to an engine issue.

After this breakdown, I can come to the conclusion that the reason for Red Bull being slow is how unreliable the car is and the engine being quite unreliable as well. The reason I’ve come to this conclusion is because in Australia, when Max Verstappen was doing his lap in Q1 and spun into the barriers, which was the cars fault as mentioned before. this showed me that the car still has a few issues. Also in Australia, Isack Hadjar had an engine failure at start of the race and that caused him to retire. Moving onto China Max Verstappen had an engine failure as well. All of this information has showed me that the Red Bull are very unreliable and something needs to change quite quickly, otherwise they will lose Max Verstappen.