Red Bull Racing driver Max Verstappen goes into the 2025 Formula 1 season looking to retain his title and become a five-time champion.
Each of Max Verstappen’s four titles have come under very different circumstances.
From pinching the lead from Lewis Hamilton on the final lap of the 2021 campaign to winning 19 out of 22 races thanks to Red Bull’s dominance in 2023.
Last year’s victory was arguably Verstappen’s best, with Red Bull losing their advantage over McLaren, Ferrari and at times Mercedes before the halfway mark in the year.
The Dutchman had to fend off challenges from Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris, clinching the championship at the Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Verstappen’s win in Sao Paulo was iconic, but the problems he faced with the RB20 didn’t make his life easy.
Red Bull apologised to Sergio Perez after failing to heed his warnings about the car that ultimately scuppered Verstappen as he could no longer drive around its fundamental issues.
Verstappen even started making car changes Red Bull’s factory wasn’t aware of to try and figure out what was going wrong.
Max Verstappen ‘vulnerable’ to Red Bull car issue he ‘really hates’
Journalist and Dutch commentator Nelson Valkenburg was speaking on The Race F1 Podcast about Red Bull’s 2024 car and how Verstappen adapted to it.
Explaining the issues the 27-year-old faced, Valkenburg said: “I’ve always been confused this year by the fact that this car has had one single trait and that’s oversteer going into a corner, mid-corner understeer and oversteer out,
“The Red Bull has been the most consistent of all the cars in the field just in a very bad way.
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“That needs to be solved and I don’t know at the end of a regulation set if you can change the DNA of your design to such an extent that you can change it.
“But they will have to because the way Max attacks a corner, he is vulnerable with that problem in the Red Bull and he hates it, he really, really hates driving the car when it’s struggling like that with that particular thing and then it really becomes very quickly a very unhappy team.
“Then it will be Red Bull against itself again, so yeah, it is problematic and I don’t know how they’ll solve it in such a short time.”
Red Bull face difficult balancing act keeping Max Verstappen happy
The likes of Lewis Hamilton and Michael Schumacher proved during their time with Mercedes and Ferrari that they were willing to work through a few years of difficulty to ultimately achieve their goals.
Verstappen did that between 2016 and 2020 before winning his first title but potentially faces another difficult period in his career.
With no Adrian Newey to guide them, Red Bull have to prove this year that they can develop a championship-winning car without him.
Unlike Hamilton and Schumacher who wanted to prolong their careers for as long as possible, Verstappen has never hidden the fact he’s got ambitions beyond F1.
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Red Bull may have to continue working on their 2025 car to keep Verstappen happy, but that may impact how quickly they can develop next year’s machine going into the new set of regulations.
Verstappen has a contract until the end of the 2028 campaign and seems happy to continue with the team until that time.
However, if they end up losing too much ground on their rivals, he’ll have plenty of suitors waiting to offer him a deal if he decides he wants to move on.
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