In 2024, Red Bull Racing started the Formula 1 season in fine form, only to lose out on performance as other teams out-upgraded the reigning champions. Heading into 2025, things don’t look much more promising.

Pierre Waché, engineer at Red Bull, was left “not as happy as I could be” after testing the RB21 — though not all is lost heading into the Australian Grand Prix.

Pierre Waché: Red Bull RB21 “did not respond”

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

Of all the teams that appeared at Bahrain International Circuit for the three-day round o Formula 1 pre-season testing, Red Bull Racing was the least visible, running a mere 304 laps — fewer than any other team.

A lack of laps doesn’t necessarily mean a team is in dire straits, but the Red Bull team’s post-testing debrief highlighted that the Milton Keynes-based outfit had been expecting a little more from their trip to the Gulf.

“I think we had a decent day today, there were a few little problems but overall, we completed quite a bit of what we wanted to do,” reigning World Champion Max Verstappen said.

“I think it wasn’t bad but at the same time there is still a bit of work to do.

“However, it is what we expected and we will keep on working and keep on trying to improve and hopefully, as we go into Melbourne, we will learn a bit more by going through all the data and see where we are at.

“It is difficult to tell where everyone’s pace is, so there is still a bit of work to do for us. We are looking forward to starting racing properly again in Australia.”

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The inability to assess the performance of other teams was a recurring theme in the Red Bull debrief, with engineer Pierre Waché saying, “I think it’s very difficult to see a starting order for Melbourne across the grid right now, you see that four teams look quite quick, including us, but we didn’t look too much at other teams, we tried to focus on our programme.”

Per Waché, Red Bull ran into some difficulties while undergoing its test.

“It was not as smooth a test as we expected and the Team expected, but it is better to find some problems here than later down the line and it is why we are here, to understand the car,” he said.

There were several factors that Waché identified as leading to that, saying, “The weather was not with us and not very representative of this track, but we tried to explore the potential of the car and tried to understand how it responds to different set-ups, and I think we more or less achieved that.”

Still, the overall prognosis is that there’s still a lot of work to do.

“I am not as happy as I could be,” Waché said, “because the car did not respond how we wanted at times, but it is going in the right direction, just maybe the magnitude of the direction was not as big as we expected and it’s something we need to work on for the first race and future development.”

Earlier in testing, though, Helmut Marko had a slightly different perspective, concluding that “the car is more predictable and reacts to the changes in the normal way.”

Marko stated that the RB21 had met his personal expectations, and that 2024’s problems have been improved.

Whatever the case may be, Red Bull would be far from the only team feeling the pressure as the F1 2025 season edges ever closer. The only thing we know for sure is that the Australian Grand Prix is set to be our first real understanding of the pecking order.

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