How much does Red Bull depend on Verstappen – now and for the future?

“I think I can probably win the constructors’ championship on my own right now”, Max Verstappen smiled during a Dutch media session ahead of the 2023 British Grand Prix. He said it jokingly, but there was truth in his comments on two fronts. At the time, Red Bull’s dominance was such that Verstappen individually scored more points (575) than the second team in the constructors’ championship altogether (Mercedes, 409). But it also spoke volumes about the struggles Red Bull faced with its second seat.

Nearly two years later, the competitive landscape in Formula 1 has shifted. Yet one constant remains: the second Red Bull seat continues to be a headache. Since Daniel Ricciardo’s departure, no replacement has been able to match Verstappen. Pierre Gasly, Alex Albon, Sergio Perez and Liam Lawson have all faltered in the second seat, opening the door for Yuki Tsunoda to become Verstappen’s fifth team-mate in Red Bull colours.

A look at the numbers

The data paints a telling picture. When it comes to both race pace and qualifying pace, Verstappen’s team-mates have consistently come up short. Ricciardo was 0.049s faster during the qualifying sessions in 2016, but Verstappen took over the next season and the gap widened with each year: 0.202s in 2017 and 0.279s in 2018.

Since then, the deficits have only grown, with Lawson suffering the biggest gaps to date. He trailed Verstappen by a full second during Q1 in Australia, was 0.813s slower during SQ1 in China, and 0.750s adrift in Q1 of the main qualifying session. Comparing Verstappen’s Q3 laps to Lawson’s best times paints an even starker contrast.

The numbers underscore that the second Red Bull seat is one of the most difficult positions in modern F1, mainly for two reasons. Firstly, Verstappen’s outright pace is hard to match in equal machinery, as the data shows. Last season, the average qualifying delta between Verstappen and Perez was 0.66s – the biggest gap between all team-mates on the grid. In the race, the gap was 0.56s per lap, once again the largest margin of all teams.

Does the Red Bull car suit Verstappen’s driving style better?

The second factor is related to the unique characteristics of the Red Bull car. Albon once described it as a computer mouse set to 100% sensitivity: extremely responsive, but also incredibly unforgiving with a sharp front end and loose rear. While Verstappen thrives with it, his team-mates often struggled to find the confidence they needed with instability on corner entries.

It raises the inevitable question: does Red Bull design the car specifically around Verstappen, or does he simply adapt his driving style better than others? Verstappen is known to hate understeer, but adds that understeer makes a car essentially slower. Red Bull’s team leaders Christian Horner and Helmut Marko usually answer the question by saying they simply build the fastest car possible, not specifically tailored for one driver.

However, Horner offered some insight during the Chinese Grand Prix weekend. “Max is quite specific in what he wants from a car to make it fast and that is generally a very positive front end, very sharp turn-in,” he told Sky Sports F1. “The consequence of that is that it will unsettle the rear of the car. For a driver, it is tremendously confidence-sapping if you’ve got a loose rear end on entry into corners.

“So that’s where he excels, that’s where he’s able to live on a knife-edge. And he is just constantly asking for more and more front out of the car. Of course, you are always going to follow the direction of your faster driver, and that leads the organisation in terms of its development.”

Team sources emphasise that this isn’t a new phenomenon. The best drivers have always managed to cope with extreme characteristics – Michael Schumacher at Benetton and Ayrton Senna being mentioned by Red Bull as two examples.

But the more a team leans towards its fastest driver, the harder it gets for the other one to adapt. Red Bull is no exception, as Horner explained: “If I think back to the beginning of 2022, we had quite a stable car with quite a bit of understeer in it, which obviously Max hates. But we had an upgrade in Spain where we put a lot more front into the car and Max made a big step forward, Checo sort of nosedived from that point.

“You’ve got to produce the quickest car, and you’re driven by the information that you have and the data that you have. As a team, we don’t set out to make a car driver-centric, you just work on the info that you have and the feedback you have to produce the fastest car that you can. And that’s obviously served us very well, with 122 victories.”

Those final remarks are interesting. Horner makes clear that Red Bull relies on ‘the available data and feedback’ and that results are leading. Verstappen has been the only driver consistently delivering them in recent years and that inevitably has shaped Red Bull’s car development in a certain direction. It makes sense for the team to follow that direction, as Verstappen is Red Bull’s only chance to compete at the front currently. The car needs to be as fast as possible in his hands. It doesn’t mean that the car is explicitly designed for him, but it does mean that making the fastest car he can still cope with – no matter how extreme it might be for drivers with different driving styles – has been Red Bull’s most logical path to success in recent years.

In 2025, this is even more pressing than before. Unlike early 2022 – when even a car with understeer was still good enough to win races – Red Bull no longer has the luxury of a performance cushion. It’s no coincidence that Perez was closer to Verstappen early 2022 and early 2023, as the numbers below confirm. As the team evolved the car into a more pointy front-end machine, which is essentially quicker, the gap increased again.

It creates a self-reinforcing loop. Because Verstappen is the only driver capable of competing at the front, Red Bull must maximise his potential, which, in turn, makes the second seat even more precarious – leaving Verstappen as the lone frontrunner and reinforcing the cycle. In a way, it shows parallels with Honda’s MotoGP team: for a long time, Marc Marquez masked many of Honda’s flaws, but the struggles of his team-mates told the real story.

What does it mean for Red Bull long-term?

The current way of working is understandable and also successful as long as Verstappen is there, but it does raise the question: what happens if he leaves Red Bull or Formula 1 one day?

The answer for Red Bull isn’t just “find a new driver”. As Horner admitted, F1 teams need to make choices, and with Verstappen being the only driver consistently competing at the front for Red Bull, that choice is a pretty obvious one to make. But it does mean that Red Bull will have to reinvent itself to some extent if Verstappen decides to leave the team or even F1 at some point.

The impact would be felt beyond the cockpit as the team would not only lose an on-track anchor, but also a major reference point in car development. The current philosophy hinges on building the fastest car that Verstappen can still deal with, but without him, more concessions in terms of peak performance might be needed to enable the drivers to unlock it with a different driving style. It would require a change in car philosophy, which can be both a blessing and a curse.

The other way around is an element to pay attention to as well: the environment Verstappen currently finds at Red Bull, where he is the main focal point for good reason, may not immediately be found at every other team. Building such an environment and mutual trust takes time, as it did at Red Bull. Could it work elsewhere? Probably. Top-class drivers have done it before, both in and outside F1 – look at Marquez and Ducati nowadays.

Verstappen himself has always maintained that he doesn’t have a fixed driving style. “I don’t think the car is necessarily suited to my driving style. I think as a driver, you need to adapt to what you get, and that’s also what I did when I joined Red Bull,” he said. “The car was always like that, to be honest. It had a good front end, but I’ve never experienced a fast car which has understeer in my life, in any category. I feel like if people ask me, ‘What is your driving style?’, I cannot tell you, because I always try to adapt to what I get in the best way possible.”

It means that for Red Bull the ‘what if’ scenario seems more important than for Verstappen. The team is to a large extent dependent on one driver for its current competitiveness – not by mistake, but by necessity. And while it’s a successful strategy with four world titles, it can also be a fragile one long-term. It’s one of the reasons why the pressure is on these months and for 2026, not just on the second driver but also on the entire team.

As Marko recently put it: “We have to provide Max with a winning car, and we know that.” The Austrian was very clear because he knows that in any other scenario, the effects can go beyond the fortunes of just one driver.