Red Bull Risk loses Max Verstappen after the violence exhibition at Suzuka | Red Bull

TUrbulence and turbulence, infection and instability, in the past 12 months Red Bull tried when it was a miracle that Max Verstappen was in the eye of the storm and calmly dragged a unruly car into his fourth formula. A fifth this year seems to be a great order, since the team from a time of the undisputed dominance to a car that they cannot tame, and in no minor disorder, so much that Verstappen thinks about its options.

In Japan, all eyes were on the home heroes Yuki Tsunoda, who was promoted to Red Bull by the sister team Racing Bulls with indecent hurry after Liam Lawson was packed in the other direction after two races. Even according to F1 standards, it was a brutal decision, but an indication of the disorder that Red Bull got involved.

The fans here couldn’t be happier, and her husband in one of the top cars led to a febrile atmosphere. Those who had made artistically tailor -made Yuki tribute costumes in the Rennbulls paintings had barely a week to improve everything to correspond to the Red Bull colors, but they managed to find the frequent fan areas in the shadow of the ferris wheel, which is filled with the solemn Yuki clothing.

This was positive at least after another week when Red Bull looked almost rudderless. The former driver Giedo van der Guard described the Lawson as a “panic movement” in an Instagram post that was expressly liked by Verstappen and which the Dutch confirmed in Suzuka with which he agreed.

Christian Horner, the Red Bull director, said that his engineers were concerned about Lawson’s ability to deal with it, while Helmut Marko, the motorsport consultant of the team, who was responsible for her young driver program, came out last week to justify the decision. His arguments lacked cohesion and felt more retrospectively to explain it, but one thing he said was impossible to ignore. “We have this great motivation to achieve this fifth title,” he said. “We also know that if we do not deliver for Max, all top drivers have performed in their contract.”

Other teams, not least Mercedes and Aston Martin, are more than conscious and have been circling for some time. The performance clause means that Red Bull has to produce a strong car for Verstappen, and they don’t have it.

After winning 21 out of 22 races in 2023, a victory would be very welcome at this time, and Verstappen Remarkable backup of Pole for the Grand Prix on Sunday is only used to further underline the talent of the Dutch. Nevertheless, it is difficult not to compare comparisons with the similarly confusing decline in Manchester City. In Milton Keynes, as in the Etihad Stadium, this is not the time for panic.

Lawson’s decision was not an isolated event, but the youngest in an almost relentless tumult. Before the beginning of the season last year, the excitement was examined that Horner was examined after a complaint by a female employee of the team because of alleged inappropriate behavior. Horner was relieved of an independent examination, she released the weaknesses at the center of the organization.

There was an internal power struggle between Horner and the parent company of the team, Red Bull GmbH, as well as between Horner and Verstappen’s father, the former F1 driver Jos, who asked openly. Marko threatened to suspend and prompted Verstappen to go. It was a power struggle that was worthy of the machinations of the Roman Senate, but not quite as bloody.

Even when they roll out the storm, the team has been beaten on many levels since then. They played it down, but Senior Key characters leave serious blows. The first was Rob Marshall’s departure as Chief Engineering Officer at the end of 2023 to become chief designer at McLaren. He followed in 2024 by Adrian Newey, the brilliant designer of the team, to Aston Martin and then Jonathan Wheatley, the sports director, who after Sauber and Will Courtenay, the head of the strategy, also moved to McLaren, even though he has held his contract from Red Bull for this year.

Due to all of this, Verstappen has remained stoically, concentrated on the job in hand and the world champion decreased the first part of last season when the car looked just as dominant in the past two years. But six races in the Miami GP came out. McLaren brought up upgrades that moved forward, while every development that Red Bull applied to try to keep step, only reset, as soon as Verstappen declared the car to be unrives.

There was no quick solution and none in the long term; The expected progress in winter was not produced. In the meantime, McLaren and Mercedes have moved forward when Red Bull made the car almost unmanageable.

Verstappens astonishing talent could have masked fundamental problems that the team did not address. The design philosophy for the change from 2022 rightly focused on the car suit who prefers the car suit and the extremely pointed front end that he prefers. For two years, her performance advantage over the opposition was so good at least in Verstappen’s hands that everything was fine, but when the other teams catch up and Red Bull had to develop, the negative features of the car and its increasingly narrower performance window became increasingly.

The pursuit of extreme performance at the expense of the drive ability was based on Verstappen’s ability to manage a demanding journey. Now it has reached the point where even Verstappen is hardly managed despite his performance in Suzuka.

Newey said he identified problems in the car towards the end of 2023 and acute in the course of 2024. “It’s something I got about,” he says. “But not many other people in the organization seemed to be very concerned about it.”

He was right, but the team, now under the technical director Pierre Waché, continued in the same direction of development to drive himself more difficult to drive to the point at which Verstappen publicly called for changes.

All of this indicates a measure of questionable decision-making, of which the Lawson tunoda switch is only the public tip of the iceberg. This special call is a no-win situation for Red Bull. If Tsunoda smashes it on Sunday, it only shows that your decision to overlook him for Lawson was incorrect; When he fails, Lawson doesn’t look better like a mistake that it is not the fault, but simply that Verstappen’s talent has hidden a fundamental problem.

Red Bull are 20 years after her debut and still an impressive force. However, there are no guarantees in F1. In the 80s and 90s the idea that teams like Williams and McLaren may weaken, since Rans would also have been imaginative. But Williams only knows too well how far the powerful can fall, while McLaren has just emerged in the doldrums for more than a decade.

Success in the past counts for nothing if the slate is cleaned clean in every season. The challenge may not be as much as Tsunoda gets through it, but how Red Bull itself is.