Red Bull solutions to kerb-riding F1 issues not a quick fix

The Dutchman is coming off the back of a challenging few races where rivals McLaren and Ferrari beat him to victories in Miami and Monaco because of difficulties his RB20 has faced over kerbs and on bumpy circuits.

The situation appears to be caused by Red Bull having left itself with too little mechanical freedom to adjust its ride settings without compromising performance because of its aggressive push to chase aerodynamic gains.

Ahead of what is expected to be another challenging weekend for Red Bull in Canada, Verstappen said that, despite a big effort back in Milton Keynes to get to the bottom of its woes, there was unlikely to be an immediate solution in place.

“It takes time,” he said. “It’s you have to redesign things, you have to come up with different things on the car and that is a work in progress.”

Verstappen reiterated remarks he made in Monaco that the ride issues were something that Red Bull had experienced for a while, but now the fact they were proving so costly meant their importance had been put in focus.

“It’s been a problem since day one of the new regulations, and this is something that we know and we haven’t been able to fix it yet,” he said.

“I do think that after Monaco it gave us another wake-up call. We had a lot of good meetings at the factory and discussions where I feel like there’s a bit more focus on that now, to try and improve that.

“I feel like, of course, with everyone catching up, naturally you can’t rely on your advantage anymore, even though your kerb riding is bad or whatever. So it definitely needs to be fixed.

“But, yeah, it just takes a bit of time to really make let’s say, big changes on the car, because some things, our design, might need to get redesigned or whatever. And you can’t do that with the budget cap.”

“But despite the limitations that Verstappen feels Red Bull will have to endure for a while, he does not sense the team’s campaign is about to go off the rails.

“I still think that we can do a good job this year if everything works out,” he said. “But at the moment, yeah, we have to try a few things, see what works best.

“And then, for sure, I think maybe some things will be different next year that maybe are a bit more difficult to let’s say redesign this year. But I’m still hopeful and confident that we can do a better job already this year.”