Red Bull admit wind tunnel ‘shortcomings’ to blame for F1 woes

Christian Horner has revealed “shortcomings” from Red Bull’s wind tunnel have been to blame for the team’s difficult start to the 2025 F1 season.

Barring Max Verstappen’s brilliant victory at the Japanese Grand Prix and remarkable form keeping him within touching distance of championship leader Lando Norris, Red Bull are enduring a torrid campaign.

Red Bull are battling a plethora of issues with their 2025 challenger, the RB21, including balance problems and tyre degradation woes.

Verstappen lost ground to McLaren's Norris after he could only finish sixth in last weekend’s Bahrain Grand Prix as he bemoaned that “everything went wrong”.

The hugely disappointing weekend in Bahrain led to Red Bull’s senior personnel staging what were dubbed as “crisis” talks in the paddock.

Red Bull team principal Horner has now admitted that Red Bull are suffering from poor correlation between wind tunnel and track data.

“Ultimately you can mask it a little through set-up and we were able to achieve that in Suzuka but I think this race [in Bahrain] has exposed some pitfalls that we very clearly have that we need to get on top of very quickly,” Horner said.

“I think we understand where the issues are, it's introducing the solutions that obviously take a little more time. I think the problems are understood, I think the problem is that the solutions with what we see within our tools compared to what we're seeing on track at the moment aren't correlating and I think that's what we need to get to the bottom of, why can we not see within our tools what we're seeing on the circuit?

“When you end up with a disconnect like that, you have to obviously unpick it, we've got a strong technical team that have produced some amazing cars over the last few years and I'm confident that they'll get to the bottom of this issue. But it's literally the tool isn't replicating with what we're seeing on the track and then it's at that point, it's like telling the time on two different watches.”

Red Bull aiming to ‘calm the car down’

Horner stressed Red Bull understand what the problem is and are currently working on a solution to “calm the car down”.

"You end up with a mishmash between what your tools are telling you and what the track data is," he explained.

"I think you've got to understand where its weakness is. The problem that we have is that we're at the end of a set of regulations where the gains are very, very marginal.

"We're seeing some of the shortcomings in our current tunnel that struggles in that area.”

Horner added: "I think it's clear we understand what the problem is. It's implementing the solution.

"So it's the entry phase to the mid-corner that he [Verstappen] is addressing and giving him the ability and grip and confidence that takes to carry speed into the entry of the corners. Now that's fundamentally an aero issue that we need to be able to give him that grip.

"We need to just unpick it and you get a big balance shift. How these cars are working with the back or front wings and so on. It's unpicking all of that and basically calming the car down."