Rebounding last season to win two of the final four races, Sebastien Buemi says Red Bull understand where they went wrong in the RB20’s development and will not “hold back” this year.

Red Bull’s run of Drivers’ Championships continued last year as Max Verstappen clinched his fourth on the trot, but the team’s fall to third in the standings meant he became the first driver since Nelson Piquet in 1983 to win the individual title with a team third or lower.

Sebastien Buemi: About making sure that we don’t hold back

Verstappen started his title defence with seven wins in 10 races and seemed to be on course to romp to a fourth successive Drivers’ title.

However, chased down by their rivals on the track, Red Bull introduced a significant upgrade at the Hungarian Grand Prix but it aggravated their already precarious balance issues.

Addressing the problem, the team’s motorsport advisor Helmut Marko told Auto Motor und Sport: “We took a wrong turn somewhere. The car has become a b*tch that only Max can tame.

“They [the upgrades] made the car more and more unpredictable. It became more and more difficult to set it up and balance it.”

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The team was forced to roll back on the updates as they sought to understand where they went wrong before bolting a revised floor onto the RB20 at the United States Grand Prix.

Two races later, Brazil, Verstappen was back on top of the podium and added a ninth win to his season’s tally in Qatar.

Having understood where they went wrong, Buemi, who spent many hours working in the Red Bull simulator at the team’s Milton Keynes factory, has urged Red Bull to push on in 2025 with the RB21.

“My input has been the same,” Buemi told RacingNews365. “But I think it’s very, very complex to explain what didn’t go well.

“As a team, we understand now what the issue was [with the RB20] and what was maybe not developed in the right way.

“Now it’s just about making sure that we don’t hold back and understand exactly where it went wrong, and make sure we don’t lose too much time because in F1, the six months of development is massive.

“But this year, it’s a very complex year, because you have completely new regulations for next year.

“[This year] you have to work on two cars, the ’25 car, and you have to work on a ’26 car. That is totally different. So at some point, it’s [about] how you want to share the resources.”

He went on to reveal Red Bull’s plan with the team intent on keeping their championship streak alive.

“We focus on both years,” said the former Toro Rosso driver. “We’re not going to give away a championship just like that.

“But at some point, somewhere in the year, if you feel like you can’t achieve much in the season, you’re going to switch the focus a bit.

“Some teams have already switched focus to ’26. We try to develop both, but at some point there will be a compromise.”

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