Red Bull concerned after Bahrain winter testing?

Among the four Top Teams of the Formula 1, Red Bull is certainly the team that caused the least sensation during the winter tests in Bahrain. The Austrian team did not seem as serene as in recent years during these pre-season tests, and This is reflected in the figures : The Milton Keynes team completed the fewest laps during the three days of testing (304 laps), with mechanical problems limiting the running of Max Verstappen and Liam Lawson on the Sakhir circuit. If we exclude Lance stroll, sick on Friday, the two Red Bull drivers were the least productive on the track.

If we combine these problems with the surprisingly gloomy weather in Bahrain and the various red flags deployed for unusual reasons (buses on the track, broken pit windows, power outages in the paddock), Red Bull's programme has been seriously disrupted during these winter tests. If the best time set by Max Verstappen (1'29″566 on C3 tyres, two tenths off the reference set by Carlos Sainz Thursday on C4 tires) tends to reassure on the potential of the RB21, the Austrian clan is not fully satisfied after these three days of testing.

"I'm not as happy as I could be because the car hasn't responded the way we wanted at times, but it's going in the right direction, concedes Pierre Waché, technical director of Red Bull. Maybe the progress was not as big as we expected and that is something we need to work on for the first race and future development. Testing was not as easy as we hoped, but it is better to find problems here than later, and that is why we are here, to understand the car.

Red Bull still in the Top 4, says Waché

Difficulties that are all the more surprising since the RB21 looks very similar to the RB20 used at the end of the 2024 season, at least externally. Despite the continuity in the aerodynamic design between the two single-seaters, the RB20's flaws have not all been corrected with a balance that is still unstable, like Liam Lawson's half-spin on Wednesday during the first day of testing. For Pierre Waché, it is impossible to say where Red Bull stands compared to its direct rivals, even if the technical director of the Austrian team sees his team fighting in the Top 4 in 2025.

“The weather wasn’t with us and wasn’t very representative of this circuit, but we tried to explore the potential of the car and understand how it reacts to the different settings, and I think we more or less succeeded, adds the French engineer. I think it's very difficult to put a pecking order on the grid for Melbourne at the moment, you see four teams looking pretty quick, including us, but we haven't looked too much at the other teams, we've tried to focus on our program."

ALSO READ > Pre-season testing: Hadjar and Ocon on the fast track, Sainz the fastest… The figures from the three days