Does Red Bull no longer have F1’s fastest car?

The 2024 season is starting to shift towards a three-horse race between Red Bull, McLaren and Ferrari as car upgrades appear to have whittled down the difference between the three teams to one or two tenths at best.

There is little doubt Verstappen and Red Bull are still in a plum position to see out both championships, but with more than two thirds of the championship still to run, the recent surges by Ferrari and especially McLaren have injected some much-needed life into the competitive order.

But while Norris was helped by the safety car in Miami, he and Oscar Piastri were on course to deliver a front-row for McLaren in Imola, only for Verstappen to gain a tow from Nico Hulkenberg. That little help from his friend delivered a bigger boost than the 0.074s and 0.091s gaps to the McLarens.

With how difficult it proved to pass at Imola, perhaps the roles of the hunter and hunted would have been reversed, and Norris’ late pace in the race showed Red Bull is now truly under pressure.

But does that mean Red Bull has fully been caught? Its free practice struggles in Imola were well documented, and Norris’ late comeback was as much down to his exquisite driving and clever tyre management as it was about Verstappen’s hard tyres dropping in temperature.

“I think for the first 40 laps we were in a really good window and he would’ve managed the gap,” Red Bull team boss Christian Horner thought.

“After he came out the gap dropped to six seconds, but he was able to hold it there. But Lando, whatever window they managed to get their tyres into, suddenly their car came alive and it just showed how sensitive these tyres are to the different conditions.”

“The recovery from Friday to Saturday was very strong and what we managed to achieve on the medium tyre was very strong. I think we need to look at why were we weak in the second half of the stint, because it was only the second half on the hard tyre compared to Lando.”

The caveats accompanying the results in Miami and Imola suggest that it would be wise to wait – beyond outlier Monaco – for Montreal and especially F1’s well-known Barcelona proving ground to draw proper conclusions on whether McLaren has truly caught let alone surpassed Red Bull in pure speed.

F1 is no longer just a battle of who has the fastest car

But what’s clear is that, with Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc…