Did Red Bull build an undriveable car? Questions from the Chinese Grand Prix.

Formula 1 spent this past weekend in Shanghai for the 2025 Chinese Grand Prix. There was a little something for everyone: entertaining racing on-track, different winners for the sprint and Grand Prix, some driver and team intrigue, rumors of a potential technical shake-up happening soon, and a bit of an argument that exposes the entertainment side of the sport.

Once out in the countryside, skyscrapers are starting to fill in the backdrop behind the Shanghai International Circuit. One of the mid-2000s crop of race tracks designed by Hermann Tilke, it's characterized by the neverending decreasing radii that are turns 1 and 2, plus the longest straight on the calendar. It was freshly resurfaced for this year, eliminating the bumps and increasing the grip level to fix a botched job performed ahead of last year's F1 race.

China was home to the first sprint weekend of the year, with a 19-lap race on Saturday in place of that morning's practice session ahead of the 56-lap race on Sunday. Lewis Hamilton, now clad in bright Ferrari red, led from start to finish, showing the kind of ability that has led him to 105 race wins. Hamilton's last year with Mercedes was better than the winless 2022 and 2023, but his new Ferrari already appears to suit him better.

This was very much the high point of Ferrari's weekend. Both Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton were disqualified from the race results, Leclerc due to his car being 1 kg underweight and Hamilton for having worn away too much of the wooden "legality plank" underneath the car, which is a telltale sign that the car is running too close to the ground.

Red Bull’s growing problem

Red Bull, by comparison, has not built a car that suits its drivers well. Yes, Max Verstappen finished second in Australia, but he needed all of his generational talent to do so in a car that is clearly not the fastest (and also has a tiny operating window). Verstappen wants a car with an immense front grip, and Red Bull has gone down that design direction with much past success.

But for the past few years, the result has been a car that requires Verstappen's car control to tame. Other drivers, who are merely very good rather than exceptional, make mistakes in the car, getting knocked out of qualifying early or crashing out of races when the team expects them to come home with a load of points.

Even in Verstappen's hands, the comparative lack of pace in this year's Red Bull was clear from Shanghai. Oscar Piastri's Mclaren reeled him in during the sprint race to take away a second-place finish, and on Sunday, the best Verstappen could do was fifth. His beleaguered teammate Liam Lawson qualified dead last for both the sprint and main event, and there are already rumors that Lawson will be replaced in Japan.

It's unfortunate that the young New Zealander will be the one to take the fall for his team having built an increasingly undriveable car. Worse yet, many think he shouldn't have been put in the position in the first place—Red Bull had the opportunity to sign the far more experienced Carlos Sainz Jr., or even promote in-house talent Yuki Tsunoda from the Racing Bulls (Red Bull's second team, meant to be a place to develop young talent). Instead, it picked Lawson, with just 11 F1 races on his resume.

Surely the blame lies with bosses Christian Horner and Helmut Marko and design chief Pierre Wache?

Two races in, to this observer at least, it looks like Tsunoda dodged a bullet. The Racing Bulls team, which is subordinate to the main Red Bull team, designed a car for 2025 that is far more exploitable by its drivers than the one Verstappen and Lawson have to race, and I'm starting to wonder if Verstappen might score more points this year if he were the one to change squads. Then again, the Racing Bulls were unable to turn any of that speed into point-scoring results on Sunday, so perhaps not.

For his part, Verstappen is reportedly unhappy with the idea of drafting in Tsunoda at this point, fearing it would ruin the Japanese driver's career, and he thinks his team should have built a more drivable car in the first place. If Lawson does get fired, it may well be Franco Colapinto—currently reserve driver for Alpine—who finds himself with what might be F1's most difficult job.

One beneficiary from Lawson's turn in the spotlight might be fellow rookie Jack Doohan. Doohan's job was already under threat from Colapinto before the start of the year; Colapinto impressed a lot of people during some substitute appearances last year, including Marko (who runs Red Bull's driver program) and Flavio Briatore.

Briatore is now acting as an advisor to the Alpine team, which he used to run back in its Benetton and then (some of the) Renault days, most likely to prepare it for sale, and he's already called time on Alpine's in-house engine program as of next year. Doohan had an embarrassing Australian Grand Prix but put in a much better appearance this weekend in a car that has lost most of its preseason speed after having to conform to new rules about wing flexibility.

Is that a V10 I hear in the distance?

More rumors came from this weekend, this time technical ones. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the possibility that F1 could go back to naturally aspirated V10 engines at some point in the future since the sport is about to move to carbon-neutral fuels.

One would think the earliest this could happen would be 2031, as the technical rules for 2026–2030 are already in place. These keep the small-capacity turbocharged V6 and use a much more powerful electric hybrid motor and battery than this year (but without the hybrid energy recovery system on the engine's turbocharger) and combine that with active aerodynamics that cut drag on the straights.

Developing these new hybrid powertrains is far from easy (or cheap), and now the buzz is about potentially going to V10s as early as 2028, with both Ferrari and Mercedes said to be open to the idea. At the same time, the new hybrid rules were responsible for attracting Audi, Ford, and Cadillac, as well as getting Honda to come back. For its part, Audi is dead set against throwing away the rulebook at this late stage and starting fresh, particularly with a powertrain with such little road relevance.

Any actual change would require the buy-in from the teams and constructors as well as the sport's governing body and the commercial rights holder, particularly since they all signed a new commercial agreement that goes into effect next year.

Are you not entertained?

Finally, we saw a bit of a fuss that reminds us that while F1 racing might be a sport and an engineering exercise, it's also entertainment. During the race, it looked like Hamilton was ignoring Ferrari's request for him to swap places with his teammate Charles Leclerc, thanks to radio messages played on the broadcast.

What we didn't hear was the first message from Hamilton to his team, telling them he didn't think he had the pace to catch the Mercedes of George Russell and suggesting the swap to the people on the pit wall in the first place. F1 says this wasn't intentional, but the fact remains that its TV production people make conscious choices about which radio messages they decide to air on the broadcast and which ones they don't, and those choices color the viewers' perception of the race.

Radio traffic in F1 used to be encrypted, but the sport's organizers require it to be in the clear, and you can hear all the communications between each car and its team from the in-car feeds on F1's streaming platform. Sometimes the snippets we hear on the main broadcast are quite amusing, but more often than not, it's just a driver trying to work the refs and complaining about competitors in the hopes of triggering a penalty. Maybe if we're going back to V10s, we can also lose some of the radio drama in the future.

That's probably unlikely, though. Drive to Survive is more manufactured drama than fly-on-the-wall documentary, with the latest season reminding me at times of a Bravo reality drama. But it found an audience, and F1 attendance has never been higher—the grandstands in China were packed, with the exception of the ones out by turn 12, which appear to have been dormant since the first few races back in the mid-2000s.

And it doesn't stop with the Netflix show, either; Apple's big-budget F1 movie, starring Brad Pitt and directed by Joseph Kosinski, will be released at the end of June. There's now a full trailer.

The last really good cinematic depiction of motorsport in my mind was Steve McQueen's Le Mans, which I will readily admit fails quite badly in terms of being an engaging movie with a plot non-racing fans might find interesting. Little since then has worked for me. Driven—originally an F1 movie itself—is a RiffTrax-level joke. Rush and Ford vs. Ferrari might have more compelling stories, but the racing scenes are mostly CGI, and I was often not able to suspend my disbelief. And only the really hardcore non-francophone would seek out Michel Valliant, which adapts the French comic.

F1 (the movie), like Le Mans (the movie) has filmed real cars—including during real races—to use as on-screen footage (although Pitt and his costar Damson Idris were in modified F2 machinery), which counts in its favor. I'm still not convinced a 50-something driver coming out of retirement and back into F1 will get past my inner pedant, but we'll see this summer.