Lando Norris and Lewis Hamilton face nervous wait as Helmut Marko explains Red Bull plan
The 2025 F1 season promises a blockbuster title fight.
With the much-anticipated 2025 campaign edging ever closer, fans are preparing for a showdown between the four drivers representing McLaren and Ferrari. Still, if Lando Norris and Lewis Hamilton are to battle for the Drivers’ Championship title, they cannot discount Red Bull.
The Milton Keynes squad endured a 2024 season to forget. While Max Verstappen defied the RB20’s declining performance to secure his fourth successive World Championship, the team could only finish third in the Constructors’ Championship, mainly due to the struggles of Sergio Perez.
However, while Perez’s poor form played a significant role in the team’s demise in the standings, there is no denying that Red Bull suffered a major drop in performance after the opening third of the campaign. Despite utilising some of the most aggressive tactics in his playbook, even the unflappable Verstappen only won two of the final 14 Grands Prix.
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Despite the worrying end to the 2024 campaign, Red Bull aren’t panicking. “The regulations will be in their final year next season, so there will be hardly any changes,” Helmut Marko told Kleine Zeitung.
“However, the cars of this era have their pitfalls, especially the working window of the tyres causes problems for many teams. Sometimes you completely lose the tyres after small temperature changes.
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“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.”
Verstappen believes that heading into the 2025 campaign with the underdog tag may play into Red Bull’s hands. The Dutchman seeks to emulate Michael Schumacher in winning a fifth successive Drivers’ Championship title, although he faces an uphill battle.
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“We won’t be the favourites, but that’s okay,” the 27-year-old told Servus TV. “We still have to change a lot of things to be number one again. But that’s okay, and maybe sometimes it’s good not to be the favourite at the start of the season.”
This confidence will be concerning news for Hamilton, Norris and Charles Leclerc, who hope to put distance between themselves and Verstappen during the season's early rounds. If Ferrari and McLaren are the two dominant teams at the start of the year, the reigning world champion must produce his best damage limitation work to keep the fight alive.
