Three-way battle

The Formula 1 juggernaut has rumbled into Sao Paolo for this weekend’s Brazilian Grand Prix and the drivers’ championship is still on the line… just.

Of even more interest though for F1 aficionados is the constructors’ championship, which has developed into a straight three-way shootout between Red Bull, McLaren, and Ferrari.

Red Bull was odds-on to win both titles

As things stand, McLaren is odds-on to win the title at -214, with Ferrari next at +200, and Red Bull an astonishing +5000. This is great for the sport, of course, but also somewhat surprising, given that Red Bull was odds-on to win both titles at the start of the season.

Before the first race of 2024 in Bahrain, bookmakers were unanimous in predicting that Max Verstappen would win his fourth consecutive drivers’ championship by a considerable margin. They also believed that, alongside Sergio Perez, the pair would accumulate enough points for Red Bull to comfortably win their third consecutive constructors’ title.

The F1 media agreed. Any debate was generally around who would come second in both championships.  

Verstappen under pressure

In truth, Verstappen remains odds-on to win the drivers’ title (-333) but what is significant is that with four races to go, they are still even offering odds. Most expected the title to be done and dusted long before now and it’s equally telling that Verstappen’s challenger, McLaren’s Lando Norris, is on offer at a modest +350.

As things stand, Verstappen leads Norris by 47 points – still a sizeable lead, which still requires Norris to gain 11.75 points per weekend – but what the leaderboard doesn’t show is that the momentum is all with McLaren.

Forty-seven points it may be but Red Bull and Verstappen are unquestionably feeling the pressure and know that, above all else, they cannot afford a Did-Not-Finish (DNF) in any of the final four races. That would potentially open the door for Norris.

With 25 points on offer for an F1 win, it would only take a Verstappen crash or mechanical problem to crank up the jeopardy even more. Add to that the fact that two of the final four weekends include a sprint race, with an additional eight points on offer to the winner, and it makes for a fascinating end to the season.

How have we got here? How did Red Bull’s dominance unravel?

Essentially, Red Bull has become a team that appears to be in turmoil behind the scenes and eventually, that spilt over and started to affect performance on the track.

I use the word eventually because the off-track problems have been there since the start of the F1 season but, to begin with, Verstappen’s performance on the track was largely unaffected.      

everything appeared to be going to plan, at least on the track

The Dutchman won seven of the first ten races – the final one of those wins coming at the Barcelona Circuit, Spain on June 23 – and on the surface, everything appeared to be going to plan, at least on the track.

Off the track, a civil war within the team was brewing, and it all began with allegations made against team boss Christian Horner by a female Red Bull employee.

As it transpired, these issues were investigated in-house by Red Bull, and Horner was absolved of any wrongdoing, but the damage had been done. It was the first domino to fall in a chain of events that has led to recriminations and squabbling in and around the team on an industrial scale.

First shots fired in feud

The first shots were fired by Jos Verstappen – father of Max – who suggested that Horner was unfit to lead the team; comments that immediately placed a strain on his son’s relationship with his team boss.

The feud still rumbles to this day and was exacerbated at the Austrian Grand Prix when it was revealed that Verstappen Snr – who was due to drive Red Bull’s 2012 RB8 at a legends parade – had been blocked from doing so by Horner.

The accusations have toed and froed since with Verstappen Snr, who was once a regular in the Red Bull garage, rarely seen on a race weekend in a Red Bull capacity.

But there are some other big characters in the Red Bull garage aside from Horner and the Verstappens, and the team is known for its ruthless, no-nonsense approach to both racing and the business of racing. The personalities come no bigger than Helmut Marko, a veteran in the industry and currently the team’s ‘motorsport advisor’.

Marko’s take on the Horner/Verstappen Snr feud was typically blunt when he claimed that Verstappen Snr is a “bigger fan of Toto than he is of Christian” – a reference to Toto Wolff, the owner and team boss of Mercedes.

Newey departs after Red Bull storm

Amid all of the above, key personnel have departed or are going to depart the Red Bull organization – none bigger than Adrian Newey, the engineering brain behind the recent run of Red Bull cars that have taken the sport by storm.    

Newey, who arrived at Red Bull in 2006 with an already impressive F1 resume, has taken himself and the team to another level with his innovative designs, particularly around aerodynamics and ground effect.

a blow to the team

Their record under his engineering leadership has been phenomenal: seven driver’s championships, six constructors’ championships, 118 race victories, and 101 pole positions. So it was a blow to the team that, in the wake of the Horner scandal, he too decided he no longer wished to be part of an organization that had turned toxic.

Next season, he will be heading up the design and engineering department of the Aston Martin F1 team. But, one suspects, the issues listed above merely scratch the surface of Red Bull’s off-track problems. If these have made the public domain, then there are likely to be others that have, so far, remained in-house.

There are other problems too, some of them by-products of their recent phenomenal success. The RB20 is still a fine racing car but is merely a development of the RB18 and RB19 – both hugely successful race cars that some described as F1 perfection.

Hampered by perfection

Therefore, Red Bull was limited in terms of the improvements they could make to the RB20. All of the small tweaks and adjustments that could squeeze a little more performance from the car had already been made, while the other nine teams all had plenty of room to improve their cars.

This issue became clearer as this season developed. McLaren and Ferrari have both added several upgrades to their cars, which have had significant effects and have shaved several tenths of a second off their average lap times. All while Red Bull has tried unsuccessfully to do the same.

The performance gap has been closed and latterly both McLaren and Ferrari have been quicker than the Red Bull. To put this swing into some perspective, since his win in Spain, Verstappen has had just one pole position and no wins.

And to exacerbate Red Bull’s problems, Perez, in their second car, has had, in his own words, a “terrible” season.                  

After a fairly strong start, which saw him claim four podium finishes in the first five races, he has now slipped to eighth in the standings. He has accumulated a modest 177 points at an average of 8.85 per race, leaving him well adrift of all his key rivals from the top-four teams. He has earned just 30% of Red Bull’s total points tally.

Red Bull drop to third

The knock-on effect of this is that Red Bull has now dropped to third place in the constructors’ championship on 512 points, behind both McLaren (566 points) and Ferrari (537) points. And while their odds of winning the constructors’ title of +5000 may appear overly generous based on a points differential of 54 points, this is driven by Perez’s lack of performance. If Red Bull are to haul themselves back into contention, it is all on Verstappen.

McLaren and Ferrari have improved their cars

Of course, there are more things at play here than Red Bull plateauing as a result of internal troubles and a lack of car evolution. As touched upon above, both McLaren and Ferrari have improved their cars immensely since the start of the season and have both benefited from several rounds of successful upgrades.

And, crucially, unlike Red Bull, both teams have two drivers who are competing for wins and podium finishes. For McLaren, Norris – while himself chasing Verstappen hard for the title – is having to battle hard for supremacy within the team, with Australian Oscar Piastri pushing him hard in every qualifying session and every race. So hard, in fact, the pair have clashed on the track on a couple of occasions.

Papaya rules set aside for Norris

While Norris leads Piastri by 64 points and has three race wins compared to the Australian’s two, the pair have gone toe-to-toe in recent weeks and have often only been separated because of different race strategies.

While “papaya rules” – McLaren’s own set of in-house rules that dictate how their drivers should race each other respectfully – have been tweaked to give Norris the best possible chance of winning the title, Piastri has been so fast over the last few races, he has put himself in the frame for podiums.

McLaren has found this a difficult balance to strike but what it has done is push each driver onto greater heights and put the team in prime position for the much-coveted constructors’ crown.

But Ferrari is pushing them hard and has, by common consent, had the fastest car in the last two races. Their drivers, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz, are both operating at the highest level and with their car coming alive in recent weeks, they appear to be a team in a hurry … literally.

Sainz and Leclerc going wheel-to-wheel

The fact that Sainz is going to be replaced by Lewis Hamilton at Ferrari next season adds another level of intrigue, as the Spaniard – who is heading to Williams – appears determined to depart with a bang.

pushing the limits of racing a teammate

Unsurprisingly, Sainz and Leclerc have been racing wheel-to-wheel in recent races and, like Norris and Piastri, have been pushing the limits of racing a teammate. But it has worked for Ferrari. A win for Leclerc in Austin, Texas (October 20) was followed by a win last weekend for Sainz in Mexico, and both are talking up their chances of a win in Sao Paolo this weekend.

This weekend is also a ‘sprint’ weekend. This means the normal format of three practice sessions followed by qualifying and then the race proper is set aside. Instead, there is just one practice session, a sprint qualifying session, the sprint race, the qualifying session for the main race, and the race itself.      

This not only changes the dynamic of the weekend but also means that there are 33 points up for grabs instead of the usual 25 – something that Norris, in particular, will be keen to take advantage of.

Norris the bookies fave for Brazil success

The bookies think he will. Norris is +200 to win the main race, and the same to win the sprint. Leclerc is the second favorite (+300 for the sprint and +275 for the main race) while Sainz, in the other Ferrari, is the third favorite for both (+333 for the sprint and +400 for the main race).

Outsiders in the betting worthy of consideration are Lewis Hamilton, who loves the Sao Paolo circuit, (+2500) and Verstappen himself who appears generously priced at +1100.            

So, it really is all to play for and, while the drivers’ championship is still Verstappen’s to lose, the constructors’ title is very much on the line.

It’s all to play for. What will Sao Paolo bring?  

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