Is Red Bull's technical approach hurting driver strategy?

Edd Straw and Gary Anderson look ahead to the final four races, with Anderson expecting Verstappen, Norris and Piastri to fight to the end. He says George Russell, Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton could decide the championship from outside the title battle by taking podiums and removing major points from the contenders. Interlagos has particular significance for Anderson: his 1991 Jordan 191 was extremely stable through the long right-hander behind the pits, although it retired with an engine failure, and Jordan later won there in 2003. He recalls enormous Brazilian crowds for Ayrton Senna and says Gabriel Bortoleto’s presence could add interest even if victory is unlikely.

Straw asks whether Red Bull should deliberately make its junior-team cars more like Verstappen’s preferred machine: strong front response and a rear that is allowed to move. Anderson reverses the premise, wondering whether Verstappen could actually be faster in the more balanced Racing Bulls after only a few laps of adaptation. He says understeer is inherently slow because the driver becomes a passenger waiting for the front tyres to grip, whereas a small amount of rear movement lets the driver help rotate the car. Anderson believes Verstappen prefers a light rear rather than unlimited oversteer, and that Red Bull is already borrowing Racing Bulls’ more balanced aerodynamic philosophy for the senior car.

The discussion turns to why drivers can describe the same car differently, illustrated by Romain Grosjean often reporting understeer while Kevin Magnussen called the Haas balanced, and vice versa. Anderson recalls Rubens Barrichello delicately teasing a car into corners while Eddie Irvine muscled it around with kerbs and opposite lock, yet both achieved similar lap times. Modern radial tyres offer less useful slip angle than older cross-ply tyres, so the driver needs confidence that the rear will initially move to rotate the car and then stop moving. Brakes and throttle are the main tools: braking loads the front, while throttle transfers weight rearward. Exceeding the tyre’s slip-angle window produces an abrupt, heavy-car slide.

Asked to choose Red Bull’s 2026 driver allocation, Anderson would give Liam Lawson another opportunity alongside Verstappen. He argues Lawson’s previous two-race spell came in a poor car and that the final result did not justify removing him. For the Racing Bulls seats, Anderson would choose two Formula 2-level prospects, specifically mentioning Alex Dunne and the other F2 driver currently associated with the programme. Straw notes that Yuki Tsunoda appeared to have gained extra races after a reasonably complete Mexico performance, so Red Bull’s decision was still pending. Anderson’s underlying recommendation is to develop drivers in well-balanced cars rather than force them to learn an excessively unstable “pointy” setup.

Straw asks why Oscar Piastri appears especially strong on high-grip surfaces while Lando Norris is often better when grip is lower, citing Piastri’s Mexico difficulty and Norris’s struggles with front graining in China. Anderson says high-grip tracks are difficult because the car generates enormous lateral and braking forces, while a lower-grip car moves more predictably beneath the driver. His interpretation is that Piastri can exploit a high-grip car without making mistakes, but tries to reach that same limit when grip falls and consequently overdrives it. Norris settles for the speed available from a sliding car; Anderson points to Norris’s unexpectedly excellent final qualifying lap in Mexico as evidence that he was not forcing the car beyond its limit.

Norris has used a modified front suspension that gives more steering feedback, while Piastri has not adopted it because it is not necessarily a direct performance upgrade. Anderson says McLaren should make both cars fundamentally identical, including that suspension, and leave only track-tunable items such as springs, anti-roll bars, dampers, ride heights and wing settings different. Shared geometry would make data correlation more meaningful and could give Piastri the sensitivity needed to interpret a low-grip car. With McLaren having secured the constructors’ title and only one point separating Norris and Piastri after Mexico, Anderson would end the “papaya rules” approach and let them race directly for the drivers’ championship, while both focus on beating Verstappen.

Responding to Tim Walters, Anderson says a 1973 budget of roughly $100,000, in dollars or sterling, could plausibly fund a season, though a team might miss races and rely on prize money. Driver salaries were often not conventional salaries: Carlos Reutemann and Wilson Fittipaldi brought sponsorship money, while Niki Lauda borrowed from a bank to progress through Formula 2. Anderson recalls that teams transported cars in transit vans and trailers, with Brabham’s 1973 Arctic truck—built during the winter of 1972 by Anderson and Bob Dance—being an innovation. A team might have taken on a season with that budget, but the scale was closer to club racing than modern F1.

For a hypothetical 1991 Jordan with modern design knowledge but only two weeks before Phoenix, Anderson says very little could have been changed. Jordan had only one four-hour, third-scale wind-tunnel session per month at Southampton University, so there was no realistic way to redesign the car immediately. He believes poles and wins were possible later that year because the team was close, but its priority was a car with a broad, understandable operating window rather than peaky aerodynamics. A modern bargeboard concept could have transformed performance: Anderson estimates that the simple bargeboard research begun around 1993–94 improved a car by 10–15%, and an idea equivalent to the highly complex 2021 packages might have been worth roughly a second per lap.

Asked which banned technology he would restore, Anderson chooses fully active suspension, potentially including steering and ride-height control. Jordan only ran a primitive active front-ride-height system on its 1993 car, raising the nose on straights to reduce drag and lowering it for cornering grip. He says a modern active system would be a major engineering challenge and could make a peaky aerodynamic car easier to drive, but that would treat the symptom rather than the aerodynamic problem. A limited front-and-rear ride-height system might have helped the current ground-effect regulations and porpoising, yet Anderson dislikes adding complexity to hide flaws and expects the 2026 active-aerodynamic rules to be extremely complicated.

Answering a question about forcing drivers to run qualifying speed for an entire race, Anderson says the physical difference is unavoidable: roughly 90–95 kilograms of fuel, used tyres, harder race compounds and less electrical deployment can make a race car five to six seconds per lap slower than its qualifying configuration. Drivers still push hard for the car’s changing weight and condition, but they must preserve tyres and energy. Next year’s power-unit rules will make energy recovery especially important, forcing teams to harvest in parts of the lap where overtaking is less likely and compromise other sections. Anderson suggests reverse-grid sprint races as a better sporting intervention: they would give backmarkers points and teach drivers to overtake rather than wait for DRS.

Anderson says the cost cap and aerodynamic testing restrictions have not put any team fully on a par with the established leaders—Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull and now McLaren. Smaller teams struggle even to spend the permitted amount, while larger teams can manufacture and test more components; Adrian Newey’s Red Bull, for example, invested heavily in fast production so a new front wing could reach the car within two weeks. Anderson supports the cap but would include everything that enables racing, including driver pay and the compensation of the top three earners, rather than excluding major categories. He argues that every component tested teaches something, so unequal manufacturing capacity still matters.

For the final question, Anderson counted the pole-sitter waiting approximately 30–35 seconds for the last car to take its place, and says that is not long enough for tyre temperatures to collapse dramatically. The greater concern is the brakes: they need roughly 350°C before working properly and become snatchy when too cold, while excessive heat above roughly 900–1000°C accelerates wear. Tyre pressure and compliance also matter; lower pressure helps traction at the start, whereas surface temperature provides initial grip. Anderson thinks commentators do heighten the tension, but the issue is real mainly because of braking efficiency. Drivers use formation-lap braking and acceleration to assess what the car will do at Turn 1, and he sees no need for a major procedural change.