How its past nightmare explains Red Bull’s surprise Singapore turnaround

With Red Bull’s RB20 known to have weaknesses over bumps and kerbs, the mindset heading into the event had always been one of damage limitation.

But things seemed even bleaker after Friday practice when both Verstappen and Sergio Perez seemed to be out of sorts with their cars.

They were both unhappy with the handling, the tyres were not firing up and there was a real risk that they were going to get stuck in the pack and struggle to score a decent haul of points.

Speaking after the first day of action, Red Bull motorsport advisor Helmut Marko said: “On Max’s car, nothing is working. On both the soft and the hard tyre he doesn’t get any grip, and he doesn’t have any balance at all.”

Head scratching in Singapore was followed by a late-night engineering session at the factory and in the Red Bull simulator in Milton Keynes, with Sebastien Buemi to try to improve the set-up and work out what was going wrong.

As team boss Christian Horner said of Buemi’s work: “He was consuming plenty of Red Bull to keep him going. He played an important part, as does the whole team, in working hard with long days and long nights.”

Eventually the team found its eureka moment and got to the bottom of what was wrong with its car.

And it all revolved around its bruising encounter from 2023, when it had struggled massively with the track characteristics – opening the door for Ferrari and Carlos Sainz to triumph.

The conclusion was that amid concerns about a repeat of problems over Singapore’s kerbs and bumps this year, Red Bull had taken a too conservative approach with its mechanical set-up to cope with the track characteristics.

However, in focusing so much on improving its ride, in the belief that this was the best route to help Verstappen and Perez, it had ultimately sacrificed too much performance.

There wasn’t enough mechanical grip, and the result was that the tyres were not getting up into the right operating window.

For Saturday, Red Bull elected to sacrifice some of those better ride elements and focus more on pure performance – which suddenly helped the RB20 come alive.

As Horner later reflected: “I think we wanted to avoid a repeat of last year and perhaps we overcompensated.

“I think the way the team reacted, the effort that went into that reaction, we were able to give…