The wait to see the RB21 is over as Red Bull put their F1 2025 machinery through a shakedown run at the Bahrain International Circuit on Tuesday ahead of pre-season testing.

Red Bull presented the RB21, the car with which Max Verstappen hopes to grab his fifth consecutive World Championship in 2025, on Tuesday morning.

The RB21 hits the track in Bahrain

Releasing a few renderings of the RB21, the first Red Bull F1 car conceived wholly without Adrian Newey’s input since the RB3 back in 2007, the soft launch was followed with the first photographs and video footage of the RB21 on track.

Driven by Max Verstappen with Liam Lawson waiting his turn later in the day, the RB21 left the Red Bull garage for Red Bull’s first run in the team’s final Honda-powered car.

gotta love the low quality pictures we get during the shakedowns pic.twitter.com/3Mr6SDsy7p

— RBR Daily (@RBR_Daily) February 25, 2025

The RB21 is the last Red Bull Formula 1 that will be powered by a Honda engine as Red Bull will say farewell to their engine partner at the end of this season. Next year’s RB22 will instead by powered by a Red Bull-Ford PowerTrain engine, the first in a new era.

First video of the RB21 on track! 📸 pic.twitter.com/iceOV2C75e

— RBR Daily (@RBR_Daily) February 25, 2025

Verstappen enters the F1 2025 championship chasing a fifth successive Drivers’ Championship title but surprisingly he isn’t the favourite after McLaren and Ferrari made huge inroads into Red Bull’s advantage last season. Of course, no one yet knows who, if anyone, has found a magic bullet that could set them apart.

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Last season Red Bull won seven of the opening 10 races with Verstappen but a misstep in the development of the already unbalanced RB20 aggravated the problem and forced the team to backtrack as they sought a solution.

Verstappen did return to winning ways at the Brazilian Grand Prix, a victory that set up him up for the World title one race later in Las Vegas, before adding another late-season P1 in Qatar.

Team principal Christian Horner believes the RB21 has addressed “some” of its predecessor’s issues.

“The team has worked very hard over the winter to work on some of the vices of RB20,” he said. “We’ve had a good winter and we’ll get the first indication of have we managed to address some of the issues.

“We managed to improve them during the course of the latter third of last year. And we’ll see if we’ve managed to go a step further over these early races.”

The Red Bull team-mates will be back in action on Wednesday when pre-season testing begins at the Bahrain circuit.

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