Red Bull Is Lost in Their Development Path, Claims Marc Priestley

Red Bull is on one of their worst losing streaks in the past four seasons. After dominating in 2023 to win all but one race and starting the 2024 season on a similar note, the Austrian outfit is desperately struggling with their car. Former McLaren mechanic, Marc Priestley feels that the defending champions are a bit “lost” in terms of their car development path.

The Milton Keynes outfit has not been able to win in the last five races with McLaren and Mercedes convincingly beating them on merit. At the Dutch GP, the Woking team worsened their situation, as Lando Norris beat Max Verstappen by a staggering margin of 22.8 seconds.

Verstappen was once again struggling with the car’s understeer issues and overall balance just like Hungary. Red Bull‘s big upgrade package from the Budapest weekend did not deliver performance as they expected.

And Priestley believes that now Red Bull is desperately “searching around for answers” to mitigate the issues of the RB20. Speaking in his Dutch GP debrief video on YouTube, he said, “If we look at Red Bull, they split their two cars across the two different configurations of floor and aero setup and part of the reason for that is because they are lost”.

“They don’t really know or understand exactly where their performance has gone”, Priestley added.

The 47-year-old contrasted the Austrian team’s situation with that of McLaren — who have been excelling with their in-season upgrades and improved their car’s pace a lot relative to the start of the season.

At the Dutch GP weekend too, McLaren had a significant upgrade package which helped Norris to win by such a big margin. The team boss, Andrea Stella has revealed that they will be bringing more upgrades in the latter part of the season to further bolster the MCL38 for their championship challenge.