Most people might remember the 2023 season as a year purely dominated by Red Bull with the only driver to beat the Milton Keynes-based team being Carlos Sainz in Singapore. Except for that one Ferrari victory, Red Bull has won every other race in 2023 and masterfully captured both championships, with Max Verstappen even breaking the record for most victories in one F1 season.

In the beginning of this year, it looked like it would be once again a smooth season as in 2023 for Red Bull, after the reigning champion Verstappen won 4 out of 5 first Grand Prix.

However, Red Bull has significantly fallen behind coming into the second half of 2024, with their most recent victory occurring seven races ago in Barcelona, where Max Verstappen drove the RB20 to the win. 

The Team Principal of Red Bull, Cristian Horner, has now revealed for German outlet Auto Motor und Sport that the issues can be traced back all the way to last year’s Spanish Grand Prix, which took place in June 2023 at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.

“We traced the development history back and it turned out that the first mistake we made was with an underbody upgrade in 2023 in Barcelona,” said Horner.

“That was also the grand prix from which Checo started having problems with the car. We just didn’t take it so seriously because Max kept winning.”

Red Bull is now putting in extra effort to fix the car issues as soon as possible and return to their winning form, with both championships still at stake as McLaren has already gotten ahead in the Constructor’s Championship standings after the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.