Red Bull might not mind that Max Verstappen’s win at the Mexican Grand Prix was eclipsed by Lewis Hamilton wrapping up the 2017 world championship.Viewed from the outside, Verstappen’s victory at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriquez circuit was the easiest of the three of his young career, with Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel effectively taking themselves out of contention by making contact at Turn 3.
As with Verstappen’s collision with Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen in the opening seconds of the Singapore Grand Prix, it robbed us of viewing what looked set to be a genuinely fascinating duel for the win.
But despite the events of lap one, this was no lucky result. As Christian Horner said after the race, Verstappen’s pace had suggested all weekend he had a race car capable of winning on merit.
“This type of circuit where we have efficient downforce on the car, the combination of low and high speed here, we have been really stable, very strong,” he explained to reporters after the race in Mexico. “It has worked very well. If he had pushed he would have been somewhere around Sebastian in terms of where lapped up to.
“Bearing in mind that we lapped Lewis and were closing in on Sebastian, the amount of pace that we had wound out of the car, I have no doubt that we were in really good shape [if Vettel and Hamilton hadn’t collided].”
The win led to Verstappen, who finished 19 seconds up on Valtteri Bottas and 54 up on Kimi Raikkonen, to suggest Red Bull can now win races on any circuit.
“[Fighting for] poles, it’s difficult to say, because we don’t have this power mode in Q3, but our car in the race has improved a lot, even in qualifying. I think we still miss out a little bit to really be comfortably fighting for pole position but if we have a track where we can overtake then I’m sure we can fight for victories, otherwise you don’t win a race like this.”
On a weekend which saw Renault’s engines struggle at the high-altitude Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, it was ironic that Red Bull showed what it could do with a clean weekend for its quickest car. Red Bull’s reliability issues and bad luck have still not gone away — in the last few months they’ve just shifted from Verstappen’s side of the garage to Daniel Ricciardo’s. The Australian’s retirement in Mexico added to the many in-race failures Red Bull has encountered this season, and they’ve possibly been more costly than people have given credit for.
If you take Red Bull’s best result from every race of the season and add the points together, the tally is 336. That’s just three more points than our brand new world champion. But Verstappen still isn’t even in the top five in the championship and Ricciardo is 141 points off Hamilton despite scoring one win and nine podiums this year. Of course, it’s worth caveating this with the fact that, if you do the same for Mercedes, the world champions’ overall points would be 377 — although, remarkably, Ferrari’s would stand at just 302.
That statistic suggests something pretty obvious: Red Bull could have at least been closer to the title fight this year if it had started from a stronger position (more on that below) and had it not been plagued so badly with reliability issues throughout the season. But F1 is a forward-looking sport and there’s good reason for Red Bull to be excited by its 2018 prospects after recent results. Unlike this season, which saw a radical shake-up of the regulations and forced teams to develop completely new concepts, 2018 will be an evolution, not a revolution, of a car which has looked to be the class of the field on a few Sundays recently.
“We have got regulation stability, so the lessons from RB13 will go into 14,” Horner said. “We are hopeful on the engine side that performance and reliability will improve. We have demonstrated we have a really competitive chassis since Hungary. If we can take these learnings into next year’s car, we can start on a strong footing rather than the second or so we were off at the beginning of the year.”
But Red Bull can’t just blame Renault for the fact it’s not in the title fight.
Correlation issues with Red Bull’s windtunnel at the start of this year left Red Bull on the back foot coming into F1’s new age of faster, wider cars — meaning the team wasn’t getting the performance it expected from certain car parts when the RB13 hit the track in Barcelona’s pre-season tests. Coupled with the power deficiency of the Renault power unit inside the car, that meant the team started the season on the back foot, a long way behind the Mercedes-Ferrari battle for the title. As we saw in 2016, it took a good chunk of this campaign for the team to catch up properly.
Red Bull has learned lessons from its recent past, which has seen it stick rigidly to its traditional strategy of leaving its launch date as late as possible before pre-season testing begins — maximising development time, but having the adverse impact of reducing preparedness for actual track running. That second point was especially problematic for Red Bull when it discovered the issue with the numbers from its wind tunnel this year, meaning it struggled to complete full days while also not seeing the expected performance levels from the package it took to Barcelona.
One of the most impressive parts of Mercedes’ dominant years in the V6 turbo era is how prepared it has been ahead of every winter testing event, normally hitting the track immediately and piling up huge mileage. Though its engine remains a major strength, a big part of Mercedes’ ability to stay ahead of its rivals in the last four years has been for its meticulous planning and how it has gone into every season with better mileage (and therefore, a better understanding of its entire package) than anyone.
It appears Horner has been taking note of the German manufacturer’s factory team and how it approaches future F1 campaigns.
“We are focusing on a slightly earlier release target, which only involves about five days,” he said about the 2018 car. “But design is so concertinaed and production so tight, that that five days is actually pretty valuable in terms of being on the front rather than the back foot. Our intention is to turn up at the first test in the position to knock out 100 laps on the first day. That has to be the target.”
Red Bull fell well short of pre-season expectations this year. But with this fresh approach to 2018, a race car looking better with every race and the dream pairing of Ricciardo and Verstappen, and the results of the last three months, it’s by no means an outrageous prediction to say next year could be the one which sees the pieces finally fall into line perfectly for the Milton Keynes team.