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Did Red Bull Build an Undriveable Car? What the 2025 Chinese GP Revealed

The 2025 Chinese Grand Prix showed a Red Bull that was difficult to get into a competitive window, not literally undriveable. Verstappen finished fourth; Lawson’s setup experiment failed.
Entry701 Date Time3 min MechanicCarCody Team
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No—not literally, based on the 2025 Chinese Grand Prix. Max Verstappen said Red Bull’s car was “not that easy to drive,” and Liam Lawson described a very small operating window. But Verstappen recovered to fourth and found more grip late in the race. Lawson’s much tougher result followed a major setup change that he said did not work. The evidence points to a difficult car to get into a competitive window at Shanghai, not one that was impossible to drive.

What did Verstappen say about the car?

After the race on 23 March 2025, Verstappen said the early stint was difficult. Red Bull lacked pace compared with nearby cars, and he was trying to manage the tyres rather than destroy them. His second stint on hard tyres began as a struggle, but the car improved as the stint progressed and fuel levels fell. Verstappen reported more grip, and described the final 19 laps as more positive than he had expected.

He finished fourth after pressuring Lewis Hamilton into a stop and passing Charles Leclerc. That result does not mean the car was easy to handle or quick enough to satisfy Red Bull: Verstappen said the team still had a lot of work to do and that the car was “not that easy to drive.” It does, however, make “undriveable” too strong a description of his race.

Why was Lawson’s weekend different?

Red Bull made a substantial setup change to Lawson’s car under parc fermé conditions before the Grand Prix. The change required him to start from the pit lane. Lawson said the team tried a large step to learn something, but “unfortunately it just didn’t work.” He also described the car as having “a very small window” and said missing it was highly penalising.

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Lawson’s result is evidence of a difficult weekend and an unsuccessful setup choice. It is not a clean comparison with Verstappen: the drivers had different setups and race circumstances, and Lawson’s pit-lane start shaped his race. The two outcomes cannot, by themselves, isolate a design flaw in the RB21.

What do the results and FIA records establish?

The Chinese Grand Prix at Shanghai ran 56 laps over 305.066 km. In the FIA’s final classification, Verstappen was fourth and scored 12 points; Lawson was twelfth after three other cars were disqualified.

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The FIA technical delegate’s report records numerous changes to Lawson’s car during parc fermé, including the gearbox assembly and associated control hydraulics, rear suspension assemblies and driveshafts, rear brake ducts and associated parameters, and an auxiliary oil cooler. This is a record of parts and parameter changes, not a diagnosis: it does not establish that any one component caused Lawson’s handling difficulty.

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What can one race tell us about the RB21?

The Shanghai evidence supports a bounded conclusion: Red Bull had a car that was difficult to get into a competitive window during this event, with different outcomes for its two drivers. Tyre management, fuel load, setup and the sequence of events all complicate any attempt to attribute the weekend to the chassis alone. The published race coverage and FIA records do not provide a quantified handling measure or isolate a precise mechanical cause.

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That conclusion applies to the 2025 Chinese Grand Prix, held 21–23 March. One event does not establish how the car performed at every circuit or throughout the season, and the cited evidence is not an assessment of Red Bull’s later cars.

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