Max Verstappen has insisted that Red Bull ‘need’ more upgrades to keep pace with their rivals after losing out to Lewis Hamilton at the British Grand Prix. The Dutchman has now failed to win in back-to-back races for the first time this season.
The reigning champions started the season with what was clearly the fastest car in the field with Verstappen winning the season opener in Bahrain by a margin of 22.5 seconds to team-mate Sergio Perez.
However, at the sixth round of the campaign in Miami, the Milton Keynes-based team had been caught by McLaren, and Verstappen was forced to watch on helplessly as Lando Norris scampered off up the road to a dominant maiden Grand Prix victory.
In the six rounds that have followed, Verstappen has won three races with Ferrari taking to the top step of the podium in Monaco and the Mercedes duo of George Russell and Hamilton collecting back-to-back triumphs in Austria and at Silverstone.
Red Bull’s predicament is now clear: they are in a four-way fight at the front. However, Red Bull are still trying to take steps forward. “We can see the gain,” Verstappen said, addressing his team’s recent upgrades.
“The weekend was a little bit hit and miss with trying a few bits on the car and of course, the weather doesn’t help. But when you look at it, if we didn’t have damage with the floor, we would have definitely been in the fight for pole.
“So that is a positive. We need to keep pushing, we need to keep bringing bits – and I know they will come and hopefully, they will be a little bit better than the upgrades at the other teams.”
Team principal Christian Horner was insistent that there are still gains to be made with the RB20 and that the reigning champions are not suffering from a law of diminishing returns within the current ground effect regulations, as some have suggested.
“I refuse to believe so because then you just get lazy,” he stated. “I am confident that everyone within the factory, they are always pushing flat out to try and bring bits of performance to the car, but there are a lot of smart people in other teams that are also doing the same thing.”