Red Bull lost their Constructors’ crown to McLaren in 2024, but Verstappen retained the Drivers’ Championship for a fourth year in succession after a dominant start to the season, while retaining his lead throughout the campaign.
After winning seven of the first 10 races in 2024, Verstappen would go on to win two of the final 14 as McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes all mounted challenges against Red Bull at different times.
It would be McLaren that took top honours in the Constructors’ Championship come season’s end for their first win in the teams’ standings since 1998, and with stable regulations heading into 2025, teams and pundits are predicting a tight season ahead.
If Verstappen is to win a fifth consecutive title, Red Bull motorsport advisor Marko believes the team’s next car needs to not be so “erratic” when it comes to minor tweaks in car setup, and believes his lead driver will be able to do the rest if they are in contention.
“The regulations will be in their final year next season, so there will be hardly any changes,” Marko explained to Austrian publication Kleine Zeitung.
“However, the cars of this era have their pitfalls, especially the working window of the tyres causes problems for many teams.
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“Sometimes you completely lose the tyres after small temperature changes. If you look at the last six months, Ferrari and McLaren were clearly the strongest teams, so we have to find a car that has a wide working window and doesn’t react so erratically to the smallest changes.
“If we can do that halfway, we’ll automatically be back in contention for the World Championship thanks to the Max factor.”
As for Verstappen himself, he admitted the team will not go into the season as title favourites despite their successes in recent years.
But he believes that, if they are able to iron out the issues they faced within the RB20, there should be more to extract this year.
“I know that if we fix our problems, we will pick up a lot of lap time, but it’s about fixing those problems,” Verstappen told media including PlanetF1.com in Abu Dhabi.
“Because I think our balance shift that we have makes it very difficult to find a good compromise with basically the tools that you have in the car. So we need to work on that for next year.
“If we can fix that, I’m confident that we have a quick race car.”
