Verstappen's years-long complaint finally being solved as Red Bull pinpoint RB22 degradation flaw

Red Bull are making tangible progress on a rear-component degradation problem that Max Verstappen says he has flagged for years, with the team deploying their final significant upgrade package of the season — a new floor and revised sidepods — at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in Baku.

Technical director Pierre Waché confirmed after the opening practice sessions that correlation between the new package and Red Bull’s simulations is good, and that the upgrade is performing as expected. Yet the more revealing admission concerned a deeper, longer-standing issue: a tendency for certain components at the rear of the car to deteriorate across the course of a session or a race.

Verstappen has raised the problem at multiple race weekends, and what makes it particularly striking is his insistence that it has persisted across several seasons — even through a wholesale regulation change and the introduction of an entirely new car for 2026. Speaking to media in Baku, the four-time world champion said the team is at last narrowing in on the cause.

“Yeah, it’s work in progress,” Verstappen said. “We see some things now, like Laurent said. Maybe some of those things cannot be changed for this year, but maybe there’s some good lessons for next year. So I feel like we are finally pinpointing areas where we can be better.”

Team principal Laurent Mekies has echoed that assessment, noting that Red Bull gathered valuable data from Verstappen’s feedback at Monza and that the lessons learned can be carried into next season, even if a complete resolution is not possible with the RB22.

Waché was candid about the scale of the challenge when asked how confident he is that the problem will be fully eliminated by the time the 2027 car arrives. “I’m not confident, otherwise I will stop working,” he said. “Every time, it’s a compromise in our business. You try to maximise the overall car performance, it means that things are tight and you don’t want to destroy everything to have that. We are working on it.”

With little left to compete for in the constructors’ standings this season beyond an isolated race win, Red Bull’s engineering focus has already shifted substantially toward the 2027 challenger. The relatively stable regulations between 2026 and 2027 mean the team can transfer the insights being gathered now directly into that project — making Verstappen’s ongoing feedback in the closing rounds of 2025 more strategically significant than the results themselves.