The Red Bull Problem

By: Derek Pierce

Pierre Gasly, Alex Albon, Sergio Perez, Liam Lawson. These are the victims of what could possibly go down as the worst team management in all of motorsports ever. Every single one of these drivers were riding career best performances into what seemed to be the most illustrious opportunity you could be given, the chance to drive for Red Bull. Six constructors' championships, eight drivers' championships, and over a hundred race victories. Anyone that can't perform with a team like that must lack the skill, right?

On the surface that seems to be the case. Even if you look at the last couple of years, Max Verstappen has still been dominating and winning championships. This problem is rooted much deeper than the last couple of years, however. Perhaps the greatness of one player can take away what a team needs to win. 

In the NBA we see teams creating a "Big 3" constantly. The Nets did it twice with Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Jason Terry then Kyrie Irving, James Harden, and Kevin Durant. The Suns did it with Durant, Devin Booker, and Bradley Beal. The Lakers with Kobe Bryant, Steve Nash, and Dwight Howard. The Clippers with Chris Paul, Blake Griffin, and DeAndre Jordan. The list can go on forever, but there's one thing all of these teams have in common. They went all in on achieving greatness and fell flat every single year.

The difference between the NBA and F1 is that you can still have individual success in F1, no matter what your teammate is doing. That's what Verstappen has done since 2019, excluding 2021 and 2022 when Perez was able to play a good second fiddle to Verstappen. Since 2019, Verstappen scored 91 podium finishes. In that same timeframe the total podiums of his teammates come to 31. The argument one could make is that there are a multitude of factors that play into these stats, even Albon was wrecked out of a couple of podiums, but the main one that's brought up is that nobody is as good as Verstappen.

That could be the case. I mean what have any of these drivers done outside of their Red Bull stint? Gasly went on to win a race with Alpha Tauri, the Red Bull sister team, a year after being dropped in the middle of the season. 

Albon, after being essentially kicked out of the sport by Red Bull, has been a key piece of Williams' progression to being a top midfield team which includes outperforming Carlos Sainz this year, who some considered possibly better than Charles Leclerc during their stint together at Ferrari.

Perez brought Racing Point, now Aston Martin, to their first ever win before his departure to Red Bull and was seen as the most underrated drive on the grid that deserved a championship capable car. Now, after the disaster that was the 2024 season him, he was ridiculed out of the sport because he was "washed" and "not good enough".

Lawson, who was brought into the VCARB seat in the middle of last season and consistently beat out Perez in races, was dropped after just two races in his first full-time season. Essentially a rookie, but the qualifying performances that saw him place the car in dead last were enough to demote him. 

Teammates of a winning player will thrive around him. Teammates of a selfish player will put up their worst numbers and reach no success. Verstappen is a selfish player. 

In F1, one driver is going to get priority on a team. That is just a fact of life. However, Verstappen is so much of a priority for Red Bull, they have sacrificed not only the performance of their car for him but also giving opportunities to drivers that deserve it less than others they have on the payroll to give that chance to. After the Miami GP last year, it became apparent that Red Bull no longer had the best car on the grid, so the team investigated to see where they went wrong. They tracked the beginning of the issue all the way back to the Spanish GP of 2023, when Perez started to give complaints about the car that went ignored because of how well Verstappen was performing. 

The poor management doesn't end there. Yuki Tsunoda, the newest driver pegged for the Red Bull seat, has been grinding it out with VCARB since 2021. Though it was a rough start with a good bit of incidents, he had pretty much cleaned it up by the end of 2022 and proved that he has the speed to be competitive if every given a chance in a competitive car. When it was announced that Perez was officially out of the seat for the 2025 season, rational fans thought this was the Tsunoda's chance to prove what he is capable of on a larger scale. Yet, Red Bull chose Lawson for the seat despite being beaten by Tsunoda in their stint as teammates.

The irony is that it might be preferred for anyone not named Verstappen to be in the VCARB now. Perez and Lawson are both very talented drivers that have the speed to compete, but they were nerfed so badly by this team that they have been hailed as undeserving of an F1 seat.

Being the second driver at Red Bull is becoming a career ending fate. With how focused that team is on Verstappen and what he wants from the car, the performance of any other driver that is getting the same car is disregarded and is only taken as being not good enough for the car rather than the car not being good enough for them. The problem lies with the heads running the team. For the sake of Tsunoda, who reportedly isn't highly favored by the Red Bull team already, I hope that he can break this cycle and set himself up for a chance to stay in the sport for 2026. Time will only tell what happens, but do not be surprised if he is running behind his former VCARB teammates. This is a set up for failure that no driver deserves.