ANALYSIS: Red Bull still holds a sizeable advantage in qualifying
Despite his current struggles, Red Bull's Mexican driver Sergio Perez is the only driver in the field who has not been overtaken so far in 2024. F1Technical's lead journalist delivers his latest analysis before action resumes at Zandvoort.
Red Bull enjoyed a strong start to its 2024 F1 title defence, winning four of the opening five rounds. It looked like that the Milton Keynes-based outfit would dominate the third year of the current era of ground-effect cars until McLaren and Ferrari achieved a sudden lift in performance.
The Scuderia won in Australia and then in Monaco while the British squad took the victory in Miami. Following a successful upgrade in Monaco, Mercedes also started to claw its way back to the sharp end of the field. So impressive was the step the Brackley-headquartered outfit took that it won three of the last four races.
At the last race before the summer break in Belgium, Verstappen started from P11 as he served a ten-place grid penalty for exceeding his power unit allocation. Although he won the Belgian Grand Prix in 2022 and 2023 from lower grid positions, the Dutchman was seemingly unable to fight his way back to the front, and finished down in P5.
Similar to the last two year, the RB20 has excelled with its aerodynamic efficiency on straights and medium-slow corners, but has lagged in certain sections compared to its three main rivals, McLaren, Mercedes and Ferrari.
Red Bull's technical director Pierre Waché admitted that the RB20 has not lived up to expectations, revealing that his team had expected the car to have stronger in high-speed corners.
Despite its issues in recent races, Red Bull has been utterly dominant in qualifying until the summer break. Max Verstappen secured the pole position in nine qualifyings. Charles Leclerc set the benchmark in Monaco while Lando Norris and George Russell have been quickest in qualifying two times apiece.
Considering the dry qualifying sessions, Red Bull was only 0.07 per cent slower in average than the pole position lap time. McLaren appeared to be the second quickest, having suffered a deficit of 0.36 per cent, while Ferrari were 0.47 per cent adrift of the pole time.
Although Mercedes looked very strong in recent qualifying sessions, they struggled for outright pace at the start of the season, which led to a deficit of 0.63 per cent.
Aston Martin was brilliant last year in qualifying trim, but they were over a full per cent slowed in average, followed by the Visa Cash RB team.
Haas had expected to struggle this season, but the American outfit has displayed an encouraging pace in most of the qualifying sessions, and its race speed has also improved. The dry qualifying sessions saw Haas sustain a deficit of 1.39 per cent to the best lap time.
Williams, Alpine and Kick Sauber have been among the five teams that have collected fewer points in the first 14 races than in the equivalent period of last year. It is therefore not surprising to see them languish down in the order with the Grove-based outfit having been 1.62 per cent slower than the benchmark times, followed by Alpine (1.73 per cent) and Kick Sauber (1.90 per cent).
