Max Verstappen played down concerns that he may leave Red Bull after the world champion was left frustrated and disappointed at the last round in Bahrain but reiterated that he was unhappy with the car and that as things stand it will be hard to defend his title this season.
Verstappen finished sixth in Bahrain, unable to make any impression against the frontrunners McLaren, Mercedes and Ferrari. The car struggles with balance problems and is proving a handful to drive, with the team identifying a disconnect between their data from the wind tunnel and its real-world performance.
After the race, Red Bull’s motorsport adviser Helmut Marko called the performance “very alarming” and warned that “the concern is great” Verstappen, who has a performance-related escape clause in his contract, could leave. Senior personnel, including Marko and the team principal, Christian Horner, held crisis talks after the race to consider how to address the car’s problems.
Speaking before this weekend’s Saudi Arabian grand prix, the Dutchman brushed off suggestions he would join another team. “Honestly a lot of people are talking about it except me,” he said. “I just want to focus on my car and work with the people in my team. That is all I am thinking about in F1 at the moment.
“I am happy [at Red Bull], I’m just not very happy with our car. But that goes for everyone, we all want to be better, there’s no secret about that. That’s what we’re trying to improve.”
There have been questions raised about internal conflicts and discord at the team over the past 12 months and whether they were having an impact on performance and on Verstappen. After the race at the Sakhir circuit, Sky’s pit-lane reporter Ted Kravitz witnessed Verstappen’s manager, Raymond Vermeulen, confronting Marko in the team’s garage. Events which Verstappen also attempted todefuse.
“To my knowledge they were having a conversation about everything, which is allowed,” he said. “We were all left frustrated with things that went wrong in the race. That’s what my manager, Raymond, and Helmut spoke about and Christian came along as well so they had a conversation. We all care about the team. We care about the team, the people and results.”
Verstappen trails the championship leader, McLaren’s Lando Norris, by eight points and is in third place behind Norris’s teammate, Oscar Piastri. McLaren have the quickest car in the field at this point and in contrast to last season, when the Dutchman opened with an enormously strong series of races, this year he is on the back foot.
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Verstappen won in Saudi Arabia in 2024 by 13 seconds from his then teammate, Sergio Pérez, and the lead he established early in the season was sufficient to see him close out his fourth title, despite a strong charge by Norris.
This season, however, he conceded that unless the car improved he would be struggling to stay in the fight. “I just go race by race. The rest is out of my hands anyway,” he said. “Of course if we are not the quickest it’s very tough to fight for a championship. I’m hopeful we can still improve things, but let’s see what we get.”
