Red Bull deliver defiant message in face of McLaren domination

Red Bull technical director Pierre Waché is adamant McLaren can be caught on performance this season despite the apparent gulf between the two teams.

Waché feels Red Bull has made strides throughout the current campaign, narrowing the gap to three-tenths of a second per lap. He claims that at the start of the season, "it was a lot more than that".

Unfortunately, for Waché and Red Bull, the team has only had one driver, Max Verstappen, to take on the combined force of Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris.

With Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda struggling on the other side of the garage over the opening nine races, Red Bull is a staggering 218 points adrift of McLaren in the constructors' standings.

Verstappen is still in the hunt in the drivers' title race, but after a much-talked-about penalty in the Spanish Grand Prix that dropped him to 10th at the chequered flag, the four-time F1 champion is 49 points shy of Piastri.

Acknowledging what McLaren has achieved in dethroning Red Bull as the team to beat, speaking exclusively to RacingNews365, Waché said: "Clearly, McLaren out-developed everybody mid last year, doing a very good job in finding the sweet spot in terms of car behaviour and performance that we didn't find.

"It highlighted that when we were very dominant in '23 and '24, we still had the same issue with the car. The characteristic was similar, and we found more performance on the car, even by increasing this type of issue, to be honest.

"You saw it when Checo [Perez] was struggling more and more, yet Max was able to extract more performance out of it. It is clear McLaren went another route in terms of characteristics, and they've been able to outperform us.

"Now we have to catch up, to help the car be more of a given but not lose performance, and to be able to give the driver the possibility to extract performance from the car."

The perception has long been that Red Bull has consistently tailored its car that allows Verstappen to consistently extract the most from it, regardless of the difficulties that may be faced by the second driver.

Waché insists that Red Bull has not been sidetracked in consistently heading down one route to focus on Verstappen.

"It's difficult," he said. "Until you have a problem, you don't see it.

"In this business, because you are so focused, and limited by resource, money, the capacity of seeing the full thing, based on how you test the car, until you have a problem, it's difficult to anticipate it, and not go in the direction we did, to be honest.

"With hindsight you can say, 'We fucked it up', but I'm not sure, now I know, it would be any different. The car is quicker, but not enough."

Despite the issues, Waché does not doubt that Red Bull will reel in McLaren.

"If I didn't think we could, we would not put this development in place, to be honest. I think we can," he said.

"They are strong in every aspect, but I think we can have them. If I didn't think like that, then I'd be putting all the resources for next year."