Coming into the 2025 Hungarian Grand Prix, few would have predicted that Max Verstappen and Red Bull would be left scratching their heads, but that is exactly where the defending world champion and his team found themselves after a challenging weekend in Budapest.
The twisty, technical Hungaroring has always presented unique challenges for teams, but this year, the puzzle proved unsolvable for the typically dominant Red Bull squad.
As practice sessions unfolded, it quickly became apparent that the balance and grip that have made the RB21 such a force throughout the 2025 season were nowhere to be found. Verstappen, who has made a career out of extracting the maximum from his car, spent every lap wrestling with an unpredictable machine.
“Looking at the whole weekend I think we are happy to be in Q3 because I’ve been more outside the top 10 than in,” Verstappen told the press, including Total-Motorsport.com, after a difficult qualifying session. “The whole weekend I’ve had no grip. Front and rear and it was the same in qualifying. So for me, it’s not really a shock, I just drove to what I already feel the whole weekend.”
A rare off-weekend for Verstappen
This is not the position Verstappen or Red Bull are used to being in. The reigning world champion, renowned for his ability to adapt to any conditions, found that every set-up change made little difference.
“No clearly not, otherwise we would of course changed it already. Somehow this weekend nothing seems to work,” Verstappen said when asked if the team had an explanation for their lack of pace.
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“This weekend already from lap one just felt off. We threw the car around a lot and nothing really gave the direction. That of course is the biggest problem because when you change a lot from the set up it will always give you positives or negatives, and ours was just nothing worked. It was just going round in circles and nothing gave you any kind of idea of what to do.”
For a team accustomed to leading the field, fighting in the midfield at the Hungaroring was a jarring experience. Verstappen himself put it bluntly: “There’s not been a single lap or a single corner that I’ve felt good. The whole weekend so far has just been sliding. I have no grip. I knew it wouldn’t be the strongest weekend for us here but I didn’t know it was going to be this hard.”
Turning point for Red Bull?
The struggles at the Hungarian Grand Prix may prove to be more than a one-off anomaly for Red Bull. The team’s engineers will no doubt be working around the clock to diagnose what went wrong, as rivals like Ferrari and McLaren continue to close the gap. Verstappen, meanwhile, was realistic about his expectations for the race and the championship as a whole.
“We are not anyway fighting anymore in the championship battle, so you just try to have good weekends here and there. This has clearly been a bad one so far,” Verstappen said. The Dutchman knows that the season is long and there will be other opportunities, but Budapest served as a stark reminder that even the best teams can stumble.
As the field lined up for the Hungarian Grand Prix, Verstappen looked forward to a tough race day, hoping simply to minimize the damage and gather data for future rounds.
“There’s a few cars ahead of me that I can maybe battle with a little bit, but of course Lewis is a little bit further down the road and he shouldn’t be there right. So he will come through a bit,” Verstappen added.
With the summer break fast approaching, the pressure is on for Red Bull to regroup and return to their front-running ways. For now, Verstappen and his fans are left wondering how quickly the team can solve the mysteries of a weekend where nothing seemed to work.
