Max Verstappen is 69 points behind in the 2025 Formula 1 title fight with 199 points available, and the fact Red Bull has brought upgrades to the Singapore Grand Prix will give him massive motivation to give it his all until the numbers don’t add up and he can’t win the championship.
Even then, he will be gunning for race wins, with the evidence suggesting Red Bull has turned the corner on its mid-season slump and the new front wing introduced in Singapore building on that.
There will be many changes hidden under the bodywork and floor that we can’t see, but the front wing has been the subject of a fair amount of attention.
As I always say, the rest of the car has to work with airflow coming off the trailing edge of the front wing, so if that’s improved then the whole car can come alive.
It also allows for other areas to be optimised, so the end result can lead to a major improvement in overall performance.
Red Bull started to turn the corner at Zandvoort at the end of the summer break. Below is the front wing specification used for that event and even though he didn’t win and lacked the pace of the McLarens, Verstappen was fairly complimentary about the performance and had good feelings about the car.
At Monza and Baku, Red Bull ran a front wing assembly derived from the same rear flap trim line. This meant the flow to the underfloor stayed reasonably consistent.
That, together with a low downforce rear wing assembly allowed the car to have a balance that Max was happy with. The result was two wins from pole position, and even though Azerbaijan wasn’t McLaren’s best weekend, I’m sure Verstappen was on track to win whatever McLaren did.
The key question after those races was would Red Bull be able to carry that level of performance into the higher downforce tracks, making Singapore the big test.
We won’t be able to start to answer that question with any confidence until qualifying on Saturday, but FP1 and FP2 didn’t look at all bad for Max, who said “there were no major problems”. Given he’s always vocal about the slightest problem, that’s a good sign.
We can be sure that, with nothing to lose, if he has a chance he will give it his all to maximise the opportunity.
The front wing is a new package, described by the team as featuring “locally increased cambers to extract more load”. It’s difficult to pick up those subtle profile changes, but what is very clear is that Red Bull has moved the two slot gap separators that I have highlighted with the red ellipses further outboard.
The rear flap trailing edge trim line, highlighted in green, is from the same family as it was at Zandvoort, Monza and Baku. However, interestingly there is no Gurney flap (noted in blue) added to the trailing edge of the rear flap as there was for the Zandvoort wing.
It's a surprise, given Max is a driver who hates understeer, that he’s not using the Gurney flap.
That means Red Bull must have been able to produce the front-end grip he requires in the slow and medium speed corners from those changes to the front wing geometry, or it could be from some other part of the car specification or set-up.
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That’s a very positive sign and suggests that Red Bull has made very real progress that translates even to high-downforce tracks.
As for Yuki Tsunoda (below), I don’t even think he is up to the Verstappen Zandvoort specification, so lagging a long way behind either on purpose, or simply because Red Bull doesn’t have enough new components.
The front wing changes probably go hand in hand with the new floor introduced at Monza (below).
As I’ve said in previous articles, once you get an improvement in airflow coming off the front wing it’s then possible to optimise components further downstream.
Does this mean Red Bull (read Verstappen) will dominate the latter part of this season? Probably not, as most of the upcoming tracks - other than Las Vegas where Mercedes got its act together - last year should suit the McLaren better than Monza and Baku.
However, if Verstappen can pull off a few more wins, and perhaps Ferrari and Mercedes find their feet and start taking points away from McLaren, that could have a major influence on the drivers’ championship fight.
