‘Reap what we’ve sown’: The Singapore mistakes that led to the end of F1 giant’s golden run

Red Bull Racing’s Singapore Grand Prix performance wasn’t just poor; it was a historically bad weekend for a team used to bossing Formula 1.

It’d been five years since Milton Keynes had last found itself with both cars out of qualifying before Q3 — the 2018 Russian Grand Prix, in the dark old days of comically large engine penalties that often resulted in teams not really committing to the grid-setting session.

But there were no regulation-related asterisks on the team’s 11th and 13th-place eliminations in Marina Bay at the weekend. That was pure performance — or “shocking” performance, as Verstappen put it.

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Before Singapore, Red Bull Racing had taken all but three pole positions — excluding Belgium, where Max Verstappen was fastest in qualifying but served a grid penalty. Its trio of defeats came at an average of 0.068 seconds.

In Singapore Verstappen was 0.734 slower than Carlos Sainz in Q2, which was 1.189 seconds off the eventual pole time.

How did it go so wrong, and has a Red Bull Racing weakness been exposed?

SINGAPORE IS NO ORDINARY CIRCUIT

It’s not the first time the Singapore streets have tripped up a dominant car enjoying an otherwise completely untroubled season.

Memories of Mercedes’s remarkable defeat in 2015 — having swept every pole up to that point only to find itself a remarkable 1.415 off the pace — were close to hand on Saturday night.

At the time there was fervent speculation that the team had been deliberately nobbled by F1’s faceless men as punishment for a secret 1000-kilometre tyre test it had conducted with Pirelli earlier that year, for which it escaped with a reprimand from the FIA tribunal.

That was only gossip and dismissed out of hand at the time. But the tyres were certainly part of the equation.

The Mercedes cars were clearly struggling badly for grip at what was the peak era of Pirelli’s made-for-spectacle peaky compounds. The W06 car just couldn’t get heat into its tyres with the set-up it needed to be able to tackle Marina Bay.

The Singapore Grand Prix is F1’s toughest track for drivers, but it’s also a difficult challenge for the cars, and not just for the cooling challenges in the equatorial climes.

The public roads are bumpy and comprise different asphalts. The corners are almost all short, sharp 90-degree turns. The kerbs must be ridden aggressively to generate lap time.

It’s a track that’s designed to unsettle the car.

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That’s all combined with the fact that the bumps and kerbs require a higher ride height than most circuits. The RB19 can run lower than its rivals at almost every track, but circuits that demand a higher ride height require Red Bull Racing to raise its car more than the others, which means it ends up further away from its sweet spot by default.

Think of the next most extreme street track, Monte Carlo, and how close the fight for pole and victory was there too.

Of course none of that precludes a good car performing strongly, but a circuit that forces more compromises also creates more possibility for things to go wrong.

“It’s such a complicated sport,” team boss Christian Horner said. “To have a car that’s competitive across every single venue, in every condition, on every compound of tyre, is a hell of a challenge.

“It’s a completely different layout, a completely different circuit.

“I think we saw it even with the Mercedes eras of domination that sometimes they come here and struggle. Maybe it’s unique to this circuit that has its differences to others.”

It’s also particularly difficult to make big set-up changes in Singapore given only FP2 is run in representative night-time conditions. The first and third practice sessions are run in the blistering heat of the later afternoon, making correlation with the cooler post-sunset circuit tricky than it would be at a conventional weekend.

RED BULL RACING SUFFERED A RARE SIMULATOR MISSTEP

It’s obvious to say Red Bull Racing didn’t get its set-up right for the unique demands of the circuit. The question is: why?

Teams arrive at each F1 circuit with their cars 90 to 95 per cent of the way to their final configuration thanks largely to their sophisticated simulators.

The remaining percentage points are dictated by driver preference after practice. Reserve and development drivers will also spend Friday night in the simulator troubleshooting any problems that have cropped up on track during the day to feed back to the race team on location.

A team like Red Bull Racing rarely gets its sums wrong in this regard. As one of F1’s biggest spending operations before the implementation of the cost cap, its simulation tools are state of the art.

And yet it arrived in Singapore way out of the window, being clearly off the pace from first practice and never getting back on it.

“I think that maybe our simulation before the weekend didn’t lead us to the right conclusion, and then you have to unravel your way out of that,” Horner said.

“We were just not in the right operating window for the car, particularly over a single lap. When you are not there, the tyres feel horrible, everything just doesn’t work.”

Part of its simulation problem was likely due to the partial resurfacing of the track, which made the first sector smoother and grippier. It broadened the set-up compromise between the flatter new section and the bumpier old parts, making it harder to nail.

The team clearly got closer to its sweet spot as the weekend progressed. Saturday practice was better than Friday practice, and the car’s race pace on Sunday wasn’t as dire as its single-lap pace.

But Red Bull Racing chief engineer Paul Monaghan suggested that it had been too eager to make up all of the lost ground from a slow Friday ahead of qualifying and ended up shooting itself in the foot.

“We’ve made some mistakes and it’s all culminated in us going out in Q2,” he said. “Nothing fundamental, but some errors we made along the way.

“We had some problems Friday morning, had a different set of problems Friday afternoon. It looked like we were making some progress on Saturday afternoon in FP3, and then we overshot a little bit for qualifying.

“I think we compounded some errors, and we have to take it on the chin and reap what we’ve sown.”

Verstappen revealed after qualifying that the car had been bottoming out in the biggest braking zones — a clear indicator of the team’s struggles to unpick its set-up misjudgment.

“Clearly we just don’t understand that issue,” he said on Saturday night. “Otherwise you don’t make these kind of changes and it’s worse. We are clearly not understanding the car this weekend around this track.

CAR CHANGES MUDDIED THE WATER

All of this took place in tandem with the complicating element of a new floor the team brought to the car for this weekend.

Red Bull Racing’s upgrade schedule has been iterative this year — in part to account for its reduced wind tunnel time as the championship leader and in part because of its penalty for breaching the cost cap — but what upgrades it has brought have been seamlessly integrated into the package.

Yet after a difficult Friday and inconclusive Saturday the team found itself abandoning the new floor in a bid to eliminate it as a contributing factor.

“It casts all sort of doubts and questions in your mind,” Monaghan said. “We weren’t on it and as settled as we have enjoyed at the majority of the races up to this one, so of course we question ourselves.

“Greater changes than we would normally apply, but that’s the situation of circumstance we found ourselves in.”

Though there appeared to be no obvious gains made from reverting to the old floor, Horner wouldn’t commit to running the upgrade this weekend in Japan.

Meanwhile, there’s also the lingering question about a recently issued rules clarification from the FIA — a ‘technical directive’ to close a loophole that could have allowed teams to design bodywork that flexes more than is allowed under the regulations.

While all aerodynamic parts are allowed some flexibility, no part is allowed to flex primarily for aerodynamic benefit. There’s been some suspicion that some teams have been finding workarounds to the regulations to achieve greater aerodynamic efficiency via bodywork that is more flexible than the rules intend.

That technical directive came into force in Singapore, and suddenly Red Bull Racing was way off its usual pace.

“I know all of you would love to blame the TD, but unfortunately we can’t even blame that, because it has not changed a single component on our car,” Horner said, before emphasising that his team had made “zero” changes to the car to comply with the technical directive.

“It’s all engineering stuff. There are no silver bullets in this business,” he said.

It was an unequivocal denial that’ll be put to the test this weekend in Japan, a circuit that on paper ought to be very productive for the RB19.

The track’s high-speed sweeps are prime Red Bull Racing territory. Another difficult weekend would demand answers to some serious questions, but a return to regular programming is expected.

So what do we make of Red Bull Racing’s off performance at the Singapore Grand Prix, a rare weekend at which everything seemed to go wrong at once for the hitherto undefeated team?

“Everything needs to be perfect,” Verstappen said. “Everyone is always saying, ‘Ah, look how dominant they are and look how easy it is’, but it is never easy.

“A lot of details that we need to get right, and this weekend clearly we didn’t get a few things right and then you are on the back foot.”

While Carlos Sainz’s victory was a welcome change of pace for Formula 1, it was also a reminder of just how high a level Red Bull Racing and Verstappen have been operating at to have taken until the 15th race to appear vulnerable.

And while the team took too long to figure out its problems in Singapore, a team like Red Bull Racing won’t be left in the dark for long.

“I think we have got a much clearer understanding, which is primarily a set-up problem,” Horner said. “We understood a lot more in the race and the pace of the car came much more back to what we expected.

“I think we have got a much clearer picture of what we would do differently.”

And lastly, something that should ring alarm bells for anyone tempted to think a core Red Bull Racing weakness has been exposed.

“I think we just ended up in the wrong window that exposed some of the weaknesses that the car has — which has actually been a very useful lesson for next year because it gives some very useful insight into some things we can address in RB20,” Horner said.

The only thing more shocking than the team’s performance in Singapore would be if it were allowed to happen again anytime soon.