Red Bull must solve Verstappen’s ‘monster’ riddle or Norris will pounce

Six meetings remain of the 2024 Formula One season and the race for the world championship will be played out in frenetic fashion with two bouts of triple-headers as Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and McLaren’s Lando Norris go head to head for the title.

The run-in, however, will not begin for three more weeks, a period that could prove decisive as the protagonists work flat out towards this final stretch. For McLaren this will be a period of fine-tuning but for Red Bull there is the altogether more urgent task of finding solutions.

The next round, the US Grand Prix, takes place in Austin on 20 October after an unusual late-season pause. This autumn break, as it has been dubbed, is however dissimilar from the sport’s traditional summer hiatus, which is genuinely a cessation of work.

During the summer shutdown personnel are prohibited from doing their jobs but the next three weeks are simply a long gap between races and the push for an edge in those final rounds will be pursued with intensity.

With the run-in so tightly congested, the six races will play out in only eight weeks, and all a long way from home: Austin in Texas, Mexico, Brazil, Las Vegas, Qatar and Abu Dhabi. Developing on the hoof is going to be a tall order. The title contenders have to hope the car they bring to the US GP hits the ground running.

Norris enters the interlude on a high. He dominated in Singapore, beating Verstappen by 21 seconds and closing the gap to the world champion to 52 points, with a maximum of 180 (including three sprint races and the point for a fastest lap) still on the table.

It is still a big ask: he has to outscore the Dutchman by just under nine points per meeting and he has rightly noted that the title is still Verstappen’s to lose. Yet he does believe he can do it and McLaren’s form is the reason for that confidence.

After a raft of upgrades brought to the Miami GP, the McLaren was revelatory, and then only improved further. It is now the class of the field and has outpaced the Red Bull that Verstappen steered to seven ­victories in the opening 10 races.

Much has been made of their flexing rear wing in this pace, declared legal but which they have since voluntarily stated they will not use again, perhaps indicative of its relative unimportance. The key part in the current ground effect cars is the floor, how it channels airflow and works with the surface aerodynamics. McLaren’s last upgrade hit a sweet spot here and they have been making hay ever since, so much so that they have introduced only minor, limited changes to the car since.

It is understood they have another major upgrade package in the works that includes a new floor but have yet to commit to it, for fear it might prove detrimental, a lesson that has been learned at great cost by other teams.

The floor is so key that it can throw off the entire balance of the car, as Red Bull, Aston Martin, Ferrari and Mercedes have discovered. In Mercedes’s case, their mid-season purple patch was brought to a halt with their floor upgrade, which has now been dropped altogether in favour of a new version set for Austin.

“When you have this kind of performance on track, you always approach things from a cautious point of view in terms of development,” said the team principal, Andrea Stella. McLaren are in a strong position, their package works and they have further time now to stress test their upgrade should they need it, putting them on the front foot.

Red Bull in contrast are still struggling with the car Verstappen has called “a monster”. It lacks balance, the front and rear not working together, making it very difficult to drive. All of which the world champion squarely blames on upgrades made since Miami, of which the floor was a fundamental component. Their frustrated team principal, Christian Horner, has described their efforts to solve it as “a vicious circle”.

That Verstappen managed second in Singapore was a superb return given they had expected to struggle at the Marina Bay circuit, but if he is to hold off Norris they need the car back to pace for the run-in. “We’ve now got the best part of a month to work hard and try and bring some performance to the car in Austin,” Horner said. “We’re 52 points ahead with six races to go. A lot of races, a lot of points on the board, there’s a lot of racing still to happen.”

How they address it – a swathe of major upgrades or a series of adaptations to the existing package – will soon become clear but they and Verstappen know his lead could look awfully fragile, awfully quickly.

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The break will also be a welcome chance for Liam Lawson to settle in with his new RB team, having been called up to replace Daniel Ricciardo after the Singapore GP. The 22-year-old New Zealander is a Red Bull reserve driver and considered a potential replacement for Sergio Pérez next season. He sat in for Ricciardo last year in five races when the Australian broke his wrist and performed well.

He has earned his chance but RB’s treatment of Ricciardo was poorly handled. After Lawson’s promotion was announced, he revealed he had already known for two weeks but in Singapore RB would not comment on whether Ricciardo was leaving. The Australian is enormously popular but with RB delaying the announcement he was not afforded a proper send-off at the track that many, including the drivers, felt he deserved.