Red Bull: How F1's 'almost perfect' team lost its DNA and imploded completely 

It was December 2023, and Red Bull had just capped off a season with 21 wins out of 22 races. It was a season in which the squad was an absolute juggernaut, and you didn't know how this team could ever lose. It was during this time that I wrote a feature detailing the team's rise, fall, and resurrection in F1.

Eighteen months later, that team is a shadow of itself. The star designer, Adrian Newey, has left and joined Aston Martin. The brand has just fired Christian Horner, the man who led the team to glory for 2 decades. To cap it all off, Max Verstappen is likely going to leave Red Bull sooner or later.

How does a team go from winning all but one race in a season to completely imploding within 18 months? Let's take a look.

What made Red Bull perfect?

When discussing the Red Bull of 2023, it is often described by many as the perfect F1 unit. It featured a brilliant aerodynamic unit, designed by Adrian Newey, Pierre Wache, and Enrico Balbo. It had the best driver on the grid in Max Verstappen. It had the best operational unit, with some of the best pit stops and in-race strategies.

Then you add a competent power unit in Honda and supplement the whole squad with the leadership of one of the F1 greats in Christian Horner, and you don't have as many chinks in the armor.

One of the highlights of the 2023 F1 season was not just that Red Bull lost only once that entire year, but also the fact that several of the races were won because the team secured crucial mini battles. Sometimes it was about having the perfect pit stop, sometimes it was about having the best strategy, and on other occasions, it was just Max Verstappen pulling off something brilliant in the car.

The Red Bull RB19 that season was a brilliant piece of machinery, for sure, but what made it even better was the driver, the strategic team, the operational team, and the overall leadership.

So, what helped Red Bull become so successful?

We have to realize in F1 that nothing happens by accident. For Red Bull to put together the kind of season that it did, it was not an accident. It was the result of years of sticking to a few principles that culminated in the perfect storm.

Stability and Patience

The seeds of Red Bull's dominance in 2023 were sown in 2014, when, arguably, the team leadership made its first misstep. We had Christian Horner underestimating the magnitude of the 2014 regulations' change and the degree of dependence on the power unit.

After dominating for four consecutive seasons, Red Bull could only muster three wins. By all calculations, the year was a complete disaster for the Milton Keynes operation. The team could have crumbled entirely at the time, and in all fairness, it was close to it. Ferrari approached Adrian Newey, and ironically, so was Christian Horner.

The team endured all this turbulence while managing to keep the services of both of them. At the same time, key members like Peter Prodromou left the team for McLaren, and other key personnel were also poached.

Fortunately for the team, it started regrouping from that point, as it knew it was working from a deficit when it came to the Renault power unit. It was going to be a long-term process, but through it all, Horner kept the core group more or less in place as the team took years of rebuilding to get close to F1's benchmark at the time, held by Mercedes.

A young elite talent in the car

What has often stood out for Red Bull throughout its F1 journey is the presence of young elite talent in the car, for the most part. The squad had Sebastian Vettel when he first went on to win four consecutive titles. Then, when Vettel moved on, the team soon transitioned to Max Verstappen in the car.

Hence, while the team was regrouping and going through a less competitive phase, they still had a driver who could extract the car's full potential.

A 'Hall of Fame' team boss

It's all good to have a stable unit and a brilliant talent in the car, but the team would not have the direction it did if it were not for Red Bull trusting a young Christian Horner as the man who would lead the team. Horner, even if he doesn't come back to F1 in the future, will go down as one of the greats of the sport.

His ability to keep a talent like Adrian Newey within the team (someone who had fallen out with McLaren and Williams team bosses in his previous stints) for 2 decades is something that does not get enough credit. Couple that with the political feistiness of not backing down against arguably bigger and more established teams early in his career, and it just showed how impressive a call it was from Helmut Marko and Dietrich Mateschitz to bring Christian Horner onboard.

A lack of internal conflict

At Red Bull, everyone knew their role. Christian Horner did his thing, and so did Helmut Marko. The lead drivers got the job done, and even when times got tough, the team got together and fought through it.

One of the things that stood out to the team was how, in 2021, when Max Verstappen was facing criticism from various corners of the media, Christian Horner, Helmut Marko, and, to a certain extent, even Adrian Newey, would put together a staunch defense for their driver. The unit worked together and in unison.

There was no politics within the team as such, and no one was making a play at someone else's expense. When things are fine internally and there's no such thing you're wasting your time on, you tend to prosper, and that's exactly what Red Bull did.

A team ran independently from the board

Finally, the last key ingredient was that Dietrich Mateschitz played little to no role in how the team was run. It was his investment, and he expected a return on it; however, he wasn't someone who was overly involved in the decision-making process.

He put Helmut Marko and Christian Horner in these roles and then let them oversee how the team was supposed to be run. The times when he interfered? Well, it was when the team wanted him to speak up.

For instance, he was one of the more vocal parties when Red Bull struggled with a substandard power unit supplier, Renault. Other than that, he was the one who invested in the team and kept that as his leading role.

So...what went wrong?

If things were this good, then what went wrong? That's the question in the minds of many who have found themselves puzzled by what has happened to the team. Well, let's dive into it.

The board got involved

Arguably, the beginning of the end was when Dietrich Mateschitz lost his life. Once he was gone, control shifted to the board, and that brought people like Oliver Mintzlaff to the forefront. Unlike Dietrich, who knew that the best way to run an F1 team was to leave them alone and let them get on with it, the board had other ideas.

As has often been the case with F1, a team that tends to have many decisions made by a board tends to struggle significantly. The reasoning behind this is that a board tends to focus on short-term goals, working from quarter to quarter. It is seeking quick results and rapid turnarounds.

An F1 team, however, is not built on short-term goals, as the lead time for implementing any changes is lengthy. This is precisely why many teams that tend to be run by boards have struggled in the sport over the last few decades. Ferrari is a classic example of this, and Alpine is to a large extent as well.

To add to this, a board wants complete control over the team and its operations. At Red Bull, the racing unit was entirely under Christian Horner's control, and for the team's results, this had proven pivotal as well.

Once it became apparent that Horner wielding this much power in the team was going to be a concern, the writing was on the wall for the team boss.

The internal conflict took over

Much has been made about the Christian Horner scandal in 2024 when the team boss was investigated for inappropriate behavior. The reality is that if this were the reason behind his getting sacked, it would have happened 18 months ago. There is much more to this, and it ultimately hinges on the sequence of events following the leak of the Horner investigation.

Soon after, it became clear that Max Verstappen's father, Jos Verstappen, and Helmut Marko were in some alliance against Christian Horner. There were attempts made to remove him from the team. The attempts ultimately failed, but Jos wouldn't let up as the media became a tool of attack for him against the Red Bull team boss.

In essence, the team's culture was broken entirely. The cause of the friction between Jos Verstappen and Christian Horner is something that has never been reported, but for some reason, Max Verstappen's father no longer wanted the team boss around.

During this time, there have been significant cultural changes within the team as well. Things have become very political, and the environment has become very contentious. At the same time, Red Bull was never a team whose inside information used to leak to the media.

In the last 18 months, a Dutch publication has almost become a 'Red Bull tabloid' of sorts, where everything becomes public knowledge. For a team's harmony, this is not a good look, and one could see this playing a role in a squad that has not faced this before.

The stability went for a toss

While all of this has been happening, there has also been an exodus of talent from Red Bull. Rob Marshall left before any of these things happened, but he was followed out of the door by Adrian Newey. Soon after, Jonathan Wheatley also left the team.

Now, the man who built the team from the atom has been thrown out as well, and when it comes to stability, there is none. The following person out of the door could very well be a few of the Christian Horner loyalists, who would be followed by Max Verstappen as well.

The Unrealistic expectations after the team's misstep

After dominating in 2023, Red Bull's design team committed a massive error by pursuing the wrong development direction, which was identified late in the 2024 F1 season. This meant that a course correction would be made in the design and development philosophy.

The reality, however, is that in F1, once you're working from a deficit, it's doubtful that you're going to overhaul someone who has mastered that set of regulations. By mid-2024, it was clear that McLaren had mastered these regulations, and it was always going to be tough for Red Bull to claw back the deficit.

The realistic expectation from the team should have been that it tried to close the gap to McLaren in 2025. At the same time, it was going to be a tough ask to expect Red Bull to emerge as the benchmark once again.

That's where the board got involved. As soon as Red Bull had the first signs of a struggle in 2024, signs of panic set in. With Max Verstappen winning the title that season, no action was taken, but the expectation remained that the team would miraculously overcome the massive deficit it had at the end of the 2024 season.

When it became clear that this was not happening midway through the season, Christian Horner was shown the door. An argument could be made that the team is so broken right now that one of them had to leave for sure.

If Christian Horner was on one side, then we had Max Verstappen and Jos Verstappen on the other. Having unrealistic expectations and the public arm-twisting of the team with claims of talking to Mercedes for a potential switch highlights the fractured nature of everything.

Among all of this, the board saw an opportunity to push Horner out and gain more control, which is exactly what it ended up doing.

The DNA is gone

When you talk about Red Bull throughout its two-decade stay in F1, you talk about a team that was free of backroom politics. You talk about a team where there is harmony, there are no leaks to the media, and most importantly, the board stays away from how the whole thing is run.

That is what the team was built on. Every core tenet of the team is now gone, and the result is now before us.

What does the future hold for Red Bull?

This is an intriguing question because the reality is that there is a blueprint for success in F1. You need an investor who is willing to invest a substantial amount of money in the program. At the same time, you want the investor to maintain a safe distance and not interfere in how the team is run.

This is precisely what Red Bull achieved when it won 14 world championships in 20 years. The team is currently, however, controlled by the board. On the current grid, we have teams like Ferrari and Alpine, which have also been controlled by the board in the past.

Neither of them have won a title since 2008 or are in any which close to winning a title either. Coming back to the what the future holds for Red Bull? The answer is, "We don't know". We don't know how the new structure works or how it would be run.

This is, however, Red Bull 2.0 now! A new team with a new structure and perhaps a new outlook on how it goes racing.