Max Verstappen concedes Red Bull will not know until they take to the track in Melbourne whether the Red Bull F1 car’s issues from 2024 have been fixed, “or not”.

Although Verstappen heads into the F1 2025 season chasing a fifth successive Drivers’ Championship title, the Red Bull driver is not the favourite.

Max Verstappen: I know that we are not the quickest at the moment

Last season the McLaren surpassed the Red Bull as the fastest car on the track and based on pre-season testing, it appears they again have the fastest car.

According to Red Bull’s motorsport advisor Helmut Marko, the MCL39 is “two to three-tenths” quicker than Red Bull’s RB21, and it has better tyre wear too.

Verstappen, however, isn’t putting a number to it.

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In fact, the Dutchman sounds a great deal more confident than Marko as he spoke of Red Bull being in “positive shape” with the RB21 already an improvement on last year’s car.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t more to come as he concedes Red Bull were not the quickest after the Bahrain test.

“What kind of shape, a positive shape, I guess,” Verstappen told the media in Melbourne. “I don’t know.

“I guess we’ll find out more this weekend, but we will try and do our best, there is not really much more we can do.

“Testing is not many days, so we found that there are already a few areas we can work on and that’s what we’ll continue to do.

“I think naturally there’s an improvement. But there are still things that we want to improve on and then do better. Now naturally, this is of course also a different track to Bahrain, so that already will feel a bit different to drive the car here, but, yes, step by step.”

“Impossible to know at the moment,” he said of Red Bull’s chances this season.

“I know that we are not the quickest at the moment, but it is a very long season. At the end of [last] season, it looked completely different and so things can always change quickly in Formula 1.

“We’ll try and make it as competitive as possible and of course up until a certain point, and I don’t know when that is, you will focus on this year and on different things.

“We will make it driveable but at the moment, it is difficult to say if things have been fully fixed or not, we just have to be patient.”

Winning his first World title with Red Bull in a wheel-to-wheel battle with Lewis Hamilton in 2021, Verstappen title defences in 2022 and 2023 were near-perfect as he clinched 15 and then 19 of 22 race wins.

Last season he was made to work a little harder as Red Bull’s rivals, most notably McLaren, closed the gap. He finished the season with nine wins, the most of any driver, and wrapped up the title with two races to spare.

This year, however, the consensus amongst pundits, fans and crystal balls, is that the title race will go down to the wire.

Asked where this year’s defence would be ‘won and lost’, Verstappen replied: “I actually don’t think about [that].

“So it’s actually way more relaxing to just go into it, trust the people around you, and go from there. You know, work hard on and off track, try to address things that you don’t like in a car or whatever, and always try to do the best on track yourself. Try to minimise mistakes and keep scoring points.”

Pressed on it being the ‘hardest’ defence yet, he replied: “I don’t think about it. Yeah, there’s no reason to think about that.”

As for his comments to the Dutch media that he would not be in the fight for the win in Melbourne and was concerned about the pace of McLaren, Verstappen kept that short: “Exactly that.”

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