The Red Bull bibgate verdict has been released, along with important Ferrari evidence against Lewis Hamilton.
Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc claimed his third victory of the F1 2024 season in the United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of The Americas in Austin, Texas.
Leclerc took advantage of a scuffle between Max Verstappen and Lando Norris at the start to take the lead, with Ferrari team-mate Carlos Sainz second and Verstappen third after a penalty for Norris. Here are our conclusions from Austin…
That’s what teams in ball sports tell themselves when they’re struggling, the plan is faltering and it seems nothing is going right.
Half time, the interval, becomes the saviour, a brief yet crucial window for the team to take a step back, reorganise and apply fundamental change rather than just papering over the cracks.
Red Bull had been crying out for half time for some months this year, ever since Max Verstappen struck that magic bollard while leading the Miami Grand Prix – the moment upon which the complexion of the F1 2024 season took a strange turn and the fastest car on the grid suddenly belonged to McLaren instead.
They have been more reliant on Verstappen’s genius lately than any self-respecting F1 team would ideally like, aware of the problems with the RB20 but without the space and time to properly address them in the midst of a breathless streak of double and triple headers.
The summer break? That offered a form of respite, but the enforced factory closure was always likely to limit what Red Bull could do about their stalling season.
It is why the rare F1 2024 autumn break of a month between the Singapore and United States grands prix, the same length as the summer shutdown but without the same working restrictions, may have just come to Red Bull’s rescue.
If there was ever a team who were going to put that extra ‘time off’ to maximum use, it was Red Bull.
They may have lost Adrian Newey and lost their way with development over the course of F1 2024 – guilty, as technical director Pierre Waché exclusively told PlanetF1.com in July, of piling on the downforce without giving enough consideration to the car’s driveability – but one thing Red Bull have never lost is their composure.
It is in the shadows over the last three weeks when all those years of knowledge, expertise and battle-hardened experience of competing for and winning World Championships, of blocking out the noise and troubleshooting and resolving the car’s issues, would have come to the fore.