Max Verstappen’s engineer just took an ‘unusual’ step inspired by Ross Brawn to help Red Bull before the Miami Grand Prix

Red Bull Racing have started the 2025 Formula 1 season by making plenty of headlines but not always for the right reasons.

Both sides of the Red Bull garage have enjoyed completely contrasting fortunes, as Max Verstappen already has a race win under his belt.

Unfortunately for Liam Lawson, his tenure alongside the Dutchman lasted just two races, and Red Bull don’t anticipate a way back for Lawson any time soon.

He’s been replaced by Yuki Tsunoda and while he’s finally scored the first points of the season for that half of the Red Bull team, his preparations for the 2025 campaign couldn’t have been any more inappropriate.

He faced a winter where people questioned why Red Bull overlooked him, before learning as much as he could about Racing Bulls’ car, just to be parachuted into the senior team ahead of a triple-header.

All of this means the pressure has been on Verstappen to perform miracles to keep his drivers’ championship bid alive and help Red Bull not fall too far behind in the team standings.

Verstappen performed miracles at the Japanese Grand Prix to win the race, but aside from that, he’s had to settle for podium finishes and even a disappointing P6 in Bahrain.

Now, his race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase has been going the extra step to help Red Bull find their way out of his situation.

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Gianpiero Lambiase makes ‘unusual’ Red Bull factory visit ahead of the Miami Grand Prix

A report from the Italian outlet Autoracer has shared more details about how Red Bull are planning to make up the deficit to McLaren.

Every team in the paddock need to try and balance improving this year’s car and working on next year’s machine ahead of the change in regulations.

Teams closer to the bottom of the championship are more likely to have already made the switch, but Red Bull have too much at stake to give up on 2025 now.

Verstappen has clauses in his contract that could allow him to leave at the end of the season if he’s not in the top two of the drivers’ standings by the summer break.

The report states that Red Bull are hoping to have an update package available for the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, which could be worth two-tenths of a second.

However, Red Bull keep having correlation issues between the work they do in their wind tunnel and what happens on the track, so it’s hard to know whether that improvement will actually happen.

Lambiase, according to the report, took the ‘unusual’ step of returning to Red Bull’s factory ahead of the race in Saudi Arabia to ‘personally contribute’ to technical discussions going on about the car.

Presumably, he was passing on the information that Verstappen had given him, but interestingly, the report compares him to former Ferrari and Brawn GP chief Ross Brawn.

Brawn, who was notorious for getting heavily involved in the ongoings at every team he worked for, is one of the figures any team would most like their staff to try and emulate given his dedication and success.

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Gianpiero Lambiase looking to emulate Ross Brawn’s success at Red Bull

Lambiase, known to many as GP, has been working for Red Bull for over a decade having started his F1 career with Jordan.

Among the shake-up of senior staff at Red Bull, Lambiase was promoted when Jonathan Wheatley announced he was taking over as Sauber team principal.

However, he hasn’t given up any of his race engineer duties for Verstappen, and while he’s sometimes one of the more frosty characters over the team radio, Lambiase deals with him well.

The Red Bull engineer has been involved in four drivers’ championship wins and two constructors’ championship victories.

He still has a long way to go to match Brawn’s achievements, having been involved in two title wins with Benetton, before being one of the main contributing factors to Ferrari and Michael Schumacher’s dominance.

Not only that, he’s one of a handful of people to have led a team under his own name to win a championship back in 2009, something that doesn’t appear to be on the cards for Lambiase.