F1 testing data discovery indicates true Red Bull pace compared to Ferrari, McLaren, Mercedes

Red Bull Racing remain one of the biggest unknowns after Formula 1’s Bahrain pre-season test, as Max Verstappen’s team appears to have been hiding their pace heading into 2025.

Many of you are sure to have the same big question after pre-season testing: where does Red Bull stand, how does the reigning world champion’s car compare against McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes, and will Verstappen struggle to take victories from the first race in Australia? We’re looking into the data to find out.

Digging deeper into Red Bull Racing at Bahrain testing

This data analysis was contemplated from the second day of pre-season, but we decided to wait until the last day to get more data and answers to provide to readers — and we knew Red Bull deserved a separate, deeper dive.

We have already seen how McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes compare on race pace, but how about adding Red Bull to the equation? Liam Lawson completed race simulations during testing alongside rivals like Lando Norris, Kimi Antonelli, and Charles Leclerc, but it remains difficult to compare the teams.

It’s worth noting that we don’t know all the details of the run: The exact fuel loads, the engine map chosen by the teams or if a car runs with extra ballast to perform different tests or simply to hide its real pace. However, for the race simulations we can assume an approximate full tank of 105 kilograms of fuel from the start of each driver’s first stint.

And it is this first stint that gives us a first clue about Red Bull’s performance. With a much shorter stint than his rivals, Lawson ran similar lap times to Leclerc and Antonelli, but was still far from Norris and McLaren at more than three and a half tenths of a second difference per lap.

However, the really interesting thing happens after the first pit stop to fit Pirelli’s C2 tyre, just like Leclerc and Antonelli did in their simulations. (Norris, however, used the C1 for his second stint.)

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Lawson in this second part of the race simulation loses almost a second per lap to Leclerc and Antonelli!

Why is this? If we look at the telemetry of the fastest laps of Leclerc and Lawson in this stint we get the answer: Red Bull is really hiding its real pace especially in the low speed corners. Appart from using a very conservative engine map for their race simulation, what might be really be causing this is a car running with extra weight -sandbagging- which is why we see Lawson struggling at low speed corners and having to drop pace hitting clearly lower engine revs.

This is also the case on the straights during the first stint, where Lawson was apparently more competitive. However, going back to this first stint, what is really interesting is that Red Bull decided to stop it just after 10 laps where the New Zealand driver is very consistent, with hardly any degradation.

Undoubtedly, the Milton Keynes team’s objective in this stint was to look for a target lap time in order to get a minimum tyre wear. Ferrari also followed that plan with Leclerc, indicating that both teams may not be far away from McLaren with a softer race tyre.

And as we’ve seen with the C3 compound, Lawson and Red Bull also tried to control the tyre degradation during the second stint with the C2 tyre.

Again, in the final stint we get some worrying numbers for Red Bull, more than two seconds behind Norris. That’s with the McLaren driver using the C2 instead of the C1. Still, Lawson again lost around nine-tenths of a second to Leclerc and Antonelli for the same reason as in the second stint.

If we make a general balance of the race simulations, we can see that Lawson has been about six-tenths per lap slower than Leclerc and Antonelli on average, and more than a second per lap slower than Lando Norris’ McLaren.

The only conclusion we can draw from this analysis of the race simulations is that Red Bull is undoubtedly not as far behind Ferrari and Mercedes, as the data seems to indicate. The Milton Keynes team is hiding its real performance much more than the others, and the Italian team also seems to have an extra point of performance under its sleeve.

As we also saw in the data analysis between Lewis Hamilton and George Russell, track conditions and temperatures — as was the case in the second half of the 2024 season — may be the big factors determining the pecking order this year.

Mercedes looks stronger than Ferrari and Red Bull in windy, low-grip conditions but a small step behind when suffering from higher degradation in ‘normal’ track conditions.

In terms of single lap performance, it is very difficult to make a meaningful comparison. However, the fastest laps of George Russell and Max Verstappen during the difficult last day of testing confirm the feeling mentioned in the previous paragraph: The W16 seems to be a more manageable and stable car in low-grip conditions.

This is especially evident in the tricky and slower Sector 2 where Russell is +0.147s faster than Verstappen. However, it seems that Red Bull still maintains its good aerodynamic efficiency on the straights, allowing Verstappen to make a significant difference in the first sector of the Sakhir circuit.

So, we move on to answer the big question: Where is Red Bull? The simple answer is that we have to wait for qualifying in Australia to give a completely clear verdict.

However, the data does not lie, and it is clear that the Milton Keynes team is not that far away in terms of performance from the second step that Ferrari and Mercedes seem to occupy behind McLaren.

That being said, Red Bull accumulated the fewest laps before Australia, which doesn’t bode well. Of course, the first impression is that Max Verstappen is going to struggle as at the end of the 2024 season to be in the battle for victories at least in the first races, seeing that the others seem to have made a clear step forward.

The ‘Verstappen’ effect can be very useful in qualifying to make the difference in such a tight pack. But if Red Bull can’t really unlock their long run pace, it will be a difficult mission for the Dutchman and his wizardry behind the wheel to hold off more competitive cars.

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