Is there light at the end of the Red Bull wind tunnel?

The Red Bull Racing Formula 1 team’s struggles in 2025 were perfectly encapsulated by the wild swing in form from Suzuka to Sakhir.

In Japan Max Verstappen took pole and scored a virtuoso win by staying ahead of the McLarens for the duration. Just a week later in Bahrain he started seventh and finished sixth after struggling throughout with balance problems and brake issues.

The difference was that on the first occasion team and driver found something akin to the sweet spot for the reluctant RB21 after trying every option. In contrast in Bahrain they didn’t hit the target, and a poor performance was the outcome.

“I think it shows the margins and the windows that you have to work within,” team boss Christian Horner said on Sunday evening.

“We’ve been struggling with two issues this weekend, one a braking issue, and secondly, just an imbalance. And when you have that, then tyre deg, etcetera, everything looks worse.

“On top of that, we’ve had a horrible day where we had what looks like a wiring loom issue in the pit gantry causing there to be a problem with the traffic light.

“So all-in-all to actually come away with a sixth place and limit it to an eight-point deficit to Lando [Norris] with the challenges that we’ve had… We need to leave here obviously focussed on what we can sort out for Jeddah in five days’ time.”

There really was nowhere to hide for Horner, with the pit stop delays – for different reasons – adding to the woes.

“It was a bad weekend for the team,” he said. “Nothing went our way from the start of the race. We didn’t get off the line cleanly, and pit stops didn’t work well for us today, and the track temperatures got very high.

“Certainly the tyre deg, if you’ve got a well-balanced car, the whole thing just comes together that much easier.

“But it’s a 24-race championship. We’re eight points behind in the drivers’ championship, and we know we need to make progress very quickly.

“So it was important today to score the most points, and he fought for, every point that he could in a difficult car today. It’s how they add up at the end of the year. That’s important.”

The brake issue came out of the blue, and just added to Verstappen’s frustration.

“He’s not getting any bite or feel from the pedal,” said Horner. “And of course, it’s such an important tool that gives the driver so much feedback that then on top of that your entries end up compromised, you’re taking too much speed in. It creates its own issues. We need to get to the bottom that pretty quickly.”

However it’s the struggle to find a workable balance that is the consistent problem with RB21.

Something isn’t correlating between the team’s simulations and what happens when the car takes to the track on Fridays, and that’s what is giving the engineers such a headache from the start of each event.

They managed to paper over the cracks in Suzuka, but there was nowhere to hide last weekend.

“Ultimately you can mask it a little through setup, and we were able to achieve that last weekend in in Suzuka,” said Horner. “But I think this race has exposed some pitfalls that obviously, very clearly, we have, and that we need to get on top of very quickly.

“And I think we understand where the issues are. It’s introducing the solutions that obviously takes a little more time.”

Elaborating on where it’s going wrong he added: “It’s the entry phase to mid-corner that needs addressing, and giving him the ability and grip and confidence that it takes to carry speed into entry of corners. Now, that’s fundamentally an aero issue that we need to be able to give him that grip.

“We need to just again unpick it. I think that you get a big balance shift. And how these cars are working with the back or front wings and so on. So it’s unpicking all of that. Basically it’s calming the car down.”

At the heart of the problem is Red Bull’s infamously old wind tunnel. It’s been good enough to create cars that have won multiple World Championships down the years, but the current machines are super sensitive, and even the best state-of-the-art tunnels have trouble keeping up with the real world.

Throw in the Red Bull tunnel’s well-known sensitivity to extremes of low and high ambient temperatures, and things start to get tricky.

“The problems are understood,” said Horner. “The problem is that the solutions with what we see in within our tools, compared to what we’re seeing on track at the moment, aren’t correlating. And I think that’s what we need to get to the bottom of.

“Why can we not see within our tools what we’re seeing on the circuit? And when you end up with a disconnect like that, you have to obviously unpick it.

“We’ve got a strong technical team that has produced some amazing cars over the last few years, and I’m confident that they’ll get to the bottom of this issue.

“Literally, the tool isn’t replicating with what we’re seeing on the track. And then at that point it’s like telling the time on two different watches.”

He added: “Primarily the wind tunnel has driven us in a direction that isn’t replicating what we’re seeing on track.

“Then you end up with a mish-mash between what your tools are telling you, and what the track data is. Obviously now, as we’re accumulating track data, it’s the track data that’s driving the solutions.”

The team is currently developing the 2026 model in the old tunnel as well as trying to firefight with this year’s car. It will have to wait for the RB23 in 2027 before the brand new tunnel under construction in Milton Keynes starts to have an impact.

Given the current struggles you might think there would be some concerns about getting it right for the new era. However, the intriguing aspect is that Horner insists that the tunnel works well with the sort of major gains that are being made as the team explores the 2026 rules.

It’s with the fine detail at the margins of the last blast of the current rules that things get a little fuzzy, especially with how the front end of the car behaves.

“The problem that we have is that we’re at the end of a set of regulations, where the gains are very, very marginal,” noted Horner. “And I think we’re seeing some of the shortcomings in our current tunnel that struggles in that area.

“If you’re not into the final few points of downforce, when you’re making significant steps, the tunnel and the tool that we have is, as it’s proved before, more than capable for those big incremental gains.

“You need to fix or understand the issues and the limitations you have because inevitably, you will get to that point in the future. We have a new tunnel coming online for ’27, but we have the current tool certainly for another 18 months or so.”

There’s one other aspect to the current struggles. It’s almost a year since Adrian Newey left the team – would Red Bull now be better off if he’d still in place with the kind of holistic overview that served him and the team so well over the decades? We can only guess…

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