Sky F1’s Bernie Collins believes Red Bull are in “big trouble”, and would put them as the “10th fastest team” on the grid without Max Verstappen behind the wheel.

Verstappen has scored all 36 of Red Bull’s points in the two races in 2025 so far, and will have a new team-mate from Japan onwards in the form of Yuki Tsunoda.

Collins: Red Bull ‘have to get second seat working’

With Red Bull opting to rotate drivers after just two races, bringing Tsunoda to the ‘senior’ team while moving Liam Lawson back to Racing Bulls, Christian Horner acknowledged Tsunoda’s extra experience will be a “highly beneficial” factor in developing the car.

Former Aston Martin strategist Collins explained that, given the particular nature in which Verstappen likes his car to be set up, development at Red Bull has moved in that direction, in line with their lead driver.

But because of the Red Bull being “very different” to what is driven at Racing Bulls, she added that, without Verstappen behind the wheel, the team would be struggling due to the “nervous, twitchy” nature of the RB21.

“Max is very, very strong. He gets the most out of the car, he puts a lap in when it matters,” Collins said on The F1 Show on Sky F1.

“He very rarely makes mistakes. He generally outqualifies others who make mistakes, he gets the best lap together when it matters, and even in racing when it matters, he manages to pull it out.

“I think that the difficulty they have as a team, and, it was a very interesting, in my opinion, interview with Christian Horner, Natalie [Pinkham] pushed him on team development, and he did say that the team had followed the direction of their fastest driver in developing the car, and now they have a car that’s quite tricky to drive, that lots of other people cannot get on top of, because it is so nervous, twitchy.

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“The characteristics of the car, looking at it now, perfect hindsight vision 20-20, Liam would have really benefited from driving that Red Bull [more], which we think is very different in characteristic to the RB.

“Liam’s performance in the RB was not dissimilar to Tsunoda, for example, and now he’s at a point where he’s qualifying 20th on the grid, and the RB looks quicker, and even Max came out and said he’d be quicker in an RB.

“I think they’re in big trouble. I think that they should have looked at the younger talent and said, ‘Who has the most forward aero balance? That’s what we believe the characteristic of that car is.’

“It’s very on the nose, we would call it, very different to the RB in characteristics. So they should look at who’s driving, of their young drivers, closest to that spectrum. They’re the one that’s going to succeed the most.

“They should have maybe put all of them in an old Red Bull for a day and said, ‘Okay, who can get the best lap time out of this car?’ That’s one metric of doing it, because the RB is fundamentally different.

“If Max leaves or doesn’t show up at a race, they are currently the 10th fastest team. And I was criticised last year for saying, when Checo [Perez] was there that if Max didn’t turn up for a race, they were the fourth fastest team, but at the minute, they’re 10th fastest.

“Your championship position for constructors is based on both cars. That’s how your employees are paid their bonus.

“It will start to become very detrimental within that team that people are looking at being fourth or fifth or wherever they end up in the Constructors’ if they cannot get that second seat working.”

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