He heads into the Australian Grand Prix and the 2025 Formula 1 season on the back of four drivers’ title wins in a row, but Max Verstappen’s expectations for Melbourne are not so high
Max Verstappen has admitted Red Bull are “not the quickest” team in Formula 1 heading into the new season.
The Dutchman enters the new campaign on the back of four consecutive drivers’ title success. He won nine races last year but seven of those came in the first 10 races, after which Red Bull struggled to compete with the likes of McLaren and Ferrari.
And Verstappen is expecting another more difficult time this year in his quest for five in a row. Previewing this weekend’s Australian Grand Prix, he said his new Red Bull machine is “an improvement” on its predecessor, but still feels others will likely have a competitive edge.
He said: “We’ll try to do our best – there’s not really much more that we can do. Testing is not many days, so we found a few areas we can work on and that’s what we’ll continue to do.
“I think naturally there’s an improvement, but there are still things that we want to improve on and to do better. This is a different track to Bahrain so that already will feel a bit different to drive the car here, but step by step.
“I know that we are not the quickest at the moment, but again it’s a very long season. If you would have asked that question here last year then at the end of the season again it looked completely different, so a lot of things can always change quite quickly in Formula 1.”
Red Bull will be as keen as their star driver is to continue their title streak this year. But there is also a balance to be struck with a new set of regulations coming into force in 2026 for which all teams must apportion some of their resources this year in order to get off to a good start in F1’s next era.
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And Verstappen admits that, at some point, his team will have to shift focus over to their next racing machine instead of working on the RB21 that he will drive this year. But he feels there are clearly some improvements to be made to the current car before that cross-over point is reached.
He added: “We’ll try our best to make it as competitive as possible. It’s the final year of the regulations so I guess up to a certain point you focus on this year and then naturally you focus on a whole different thing.
“We’ll make it more driveable, but Bahrain is very different to what we get here so it’s a bit difficult to say if things have been fully fixed or not. I guess we just have to be patient and see how much we can regain.”