Max Verstappen's frustrated radio messages show the growing pressure at Red Bull (2024)

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Max Verstappen’s frustration escalated during the Hungarian Grand Prix and played out for the entire world to hear on his team radio.

In a far cry from the domination of 2023 and the early part of this season, Verstappen’s struggles — and reaction to those struggles — pointed to potential fissures within a team that once seemed unassailable.

Verstappen sounded annoyed at the start after Red Bull told him to give a position back to Lando Norris. A first-lap incident saw the Dutchman go off track at Turn 1 and gain an advantage when he and the McLarens went three-wide.

“Then you can tell the FIA that’s how we’re going to race from now onwards,” the Dutchman said over the radio. “Just driving people off the road.”

The radio messages escalated as the race continued, sometimes including expletives. Competitors undercut Verstappen at both pitstops after he stayed out a few laps long. He said after the race, “The wrong strategy calls put me on the back foot where I constantly had to fight people, try to overtake, but it didn’t work.” The car, fitted with a major upgrade package, didn’t feel the best. Verstappen drove behind Lewis Hamilton for much of the race, battling for the final podium spot.

It ended with the RB20 going airborne as Verstappen clipped Hamilton’s front-right wheel with seven laps to go. The driver’s car suffered some damage, and Verstappen complained about Hamilton potentially moving under braking. But race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase quashed Verstappen’s radio anger.

VERSTAPPEN 💥 HAMILTON

A big hit which sent the Red Bull flying and ultimately ended the fight for P3 🥉#F1 #HungarianGP pic.twitter.com/I7K2Nu5sgG

— Formula 1 (@F1) July 21, 2024

“I’m not even going to get into a radio fight with the other teams, Max. We’ll let the stewards do their thing,” Lambiase said. “It’s childish on the radio. Childish.” (Red Bull team boss Christian Horner felt Lambiase’s message was about other teams, not the Dutchman).

All this culminated in Verstappen securing a fifth-place finish, his second-worst result this year in races he’s completed. Coupled with Sergio Pérez’s seventh-place finish, Red Bull walked away with a mere 16 points. A world away from the mega hauls powered by Verstappen victories that were once the norm.

Red Bull may have started the 2024 season as the most dominant team and looked set to continue its reign. Verstappen has been driving at a very high level, and the pit stops have mostly been cleanly executed. But the car is a different story as others on the grid, like McLaren, have quickly caught up to the Milton Keynes-based team. And on a weekend when Red Bull wasn’t the fastest, rare strategy miscues might have cost a possible podium finish.

“I knew it was already going to be a difficult race, and beating McLaren would be tough,” Verstappen said. “But then you at least need to get a P3 over the line, and even that was difficult.”

Some pundits criticized Verstappen’s radio messages.

It’s not the first time his and Lambiase’s radio conversations have become a topic of discussion. The pair bickered during the 2023 Belgian GP, but no underlying tension existed. However, Verstappen’s frustration was evident in this past weekend’s Hungarian GP.

At one point, Verstappen touched on a source of his frustration, saying over the team radio, “It’s quite impressive how we managed to get undercut. It completely f—ed my race.” He had been undercut twice by the time the race finished. On the first round of pit stops, the Red Bull driver got stuck in dirty air when Hamilton’s tires started dropping off and lost a spot. On the second round of stops, Verstappen lost a spot to Charles Leclerc.

Dirty air can slow a car down because it negatively affects the aerodynamic performance of the car behind and reduces downforce. It didn’t help that Verstappen’s car wasn’t as quick compared to the competition as it had been earlier this season or last year.

Later in the race, Lambiase suggested Verstappen was pushing too hard on a new set of tires, saying, “Well, that’s some gentle introduction.” Verstappen lashed out: “No mate, don’t give me that s— now. You guys gave me this s— strategy, OK? I’m trying to rescue what’s left.”

These radio moments occur in the heat of the moment, and only portions are broadcasted. Verstappen dismissed the idea that his radio messages were worse than usual, saying, “No, I don’t agree with that. But I was just annoyed with (Sunday) and maybe the team at the time didn’t realize I think what they did wrong, or they maybe didn’t see it was so severe. But in the car, you have lots of different feelings.”

Verstappen and Lambiase have worked together for eight years and are known for their blunt communication style. But some critics may have felt Verstappen disrespected his team. When the suggestion was put to him in the media pen, Verstappen said of those detractors, “They can all f— off.”

Sky Sports asked the Dutchman about the messages and whether he needed to apologize, but he dismissed the notion. “I don’t think we need to apologize. I just think we need to do a better job. I don’t know why people think you cannot be vocal on the radio. This is a sport. If some people don’t like that, then stay home.”

Some pundits suggested that Verstappen’s frustrations during the race may have been tied to his sim racing. The night before the grand prix, he was racing until 3 a.m., but this is not new. The Red Bull driver has won races before on weekends he’s done sim racing, like at Imola.

“I think people draw conclusions, but Max knows what’s required, and we trust his judgment on that,” Horner said. “He knows what it takes to drive a grand prix car and to win grands prix and be a world champion. And look, as a team, we always work as a team, and whatever discussions of how to improve will always not take place through the media.”

But what’s different now is that Red Bull is no longer the fastest team. Since Imola, four other drivers have won races, while Verstappen has secured two victories (Canada and Spain). This season is the first since his 2021 title battle with Hamilton that Verstappen has felt legitimate pressure. Ferrari challenged at the beginning of 2022 before Red Bull and Verstappen ran away with the titles. At this race last year, he secured his seventh straight win (by 33 seconds) and extended the team’s then-unblemished record.

But this year’s Hungarian GP marks the first time since 2021 that Verstappen has gone three races without a win.

“With stable regulations, the margin gains — you’re into a curve where the gains are going to become harder and harder to find,” Horner said. “That’s normal. That’s the normal cycle. I’ve been in this business 20 years; that’s what happens. It doesn’t mean you accept it. It means you’ve just got to work harder to find the incremental gains and execute good races and be on the top of your game.

“We know we need to improve in the second half of the year.”

On Saturday, Verstappen punched his steering wheel as he crossed the line in Q3. His lap time landed him P3 and was 0.046 seconds off of Lando Norris’ pole position time. When asked about his reaction, he said, “I’m not allowed to be frustrated? Yeah, that’s what happened.”

Red Bull hasn’t had the pace to claim it has the fastest car. As the rest of the grid closes the gap, McLaren has emerged as the biggest threat. Over the first six races of the year, Red Bull built a 115-point gap over the Woking-based crew – after McLaren’s 1-2 finish in Hungary it has narrowed to 51 points.

Red Bull brought a set of upgrades to Hungary Verstappen described as “a bit bigger to what we have brought already,” adding that “for everyone, this is an important weekend.” The Hungarian GP marked the second-to-last race before the summer break, which includes a two-week shutdown. For 14 days, teams aren’t allowed to work on production or car design.

Verstappen agreed this round of upgrades was crucial for Red Bull’s near future. “If this is not giving us some good lap time, then I don’t know how the rest of the season is going to evolve. But also, at the same time, I don’t know what’s coming from the other teams. We just focus on ourselves. We are bringing quite some things to the car, and I hope that will give us quite a bit of lap time.”

But as the weekend wore on, McLaren stayed ahead of Verstappen, and third place looked like the best he could achieve. Strategy questions aside, Red Bull will review the data gathered last weekend to see where it needs to optimize the car. Horner said the car will be “a different specification again” at Spa this weekend. Did the upgrades at Hungary not deliver?

“We need to expand that operating window for the car, so when the car is in the right window, it qualifies on pole by four-tenths in Austria, and then (at Hungary) we missed the pole by less than a tenth,” Horner said. “But you can see when you listen to the driver, particularly Max, he’s got limitations in the car that he knows is where the performance, the trick is how you translate those issues into solutions, engineering-wise and aerodynamically.”

Upgrades take time, and Hungary and Spa are two different types of tracks. “We need to work. I mean, it’s not like suddenly next weekend, we can have new upgrades on the car. So yeah, it is a problem,” Verstappen said to F1TV. He added that they need to improve the package, but now, “I think race pace, qualifying pace, we are behind.”

A title battle is brewing in F1, and there’s little room for error. As Horner puts it, Red Bull had a “unicorn year” in 2023. But now, it’s under pressure to operate at its typical high level.

Additional reporting by Luke Smith

(Lead photo of Max Verstappen: Bryn Lennon/Getty Images, Charniaux/XPB Images/action press/Sipa USA)

Madeline Coleman is a Staff Writer for The Athletic covering Formula One. Prior to joining The Athletic, she served as a writer and editor on Sports Illustrated’s breaking and trending news team. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Follow Madeline on Twitter @mwc13_3