Red Bull’s struggles with their race car’s virtual testing might continue to give Max Verstappen headaches in 2025.
Last season, something kept bugging the Formula 1 champion. The car would look perfect in simulations and wind tunnel tests, but once they got it on the actual track? Things just didn’t match up.
It’s what engineers call a "correlation problem" – when virtual testing doesn’t line up with real-world performance. And it’s driving everyone at Red Bull a bit crazy.
"When you’ve got correlation issues, you start doubting everything," says Pierre Waché, Red Bull’s technical chief. "It’s not that you’re completely lost, but you just can’t trust what your tools are telling you anymore."
The tricky part? What Verstappen felt in the car last year was different from what the engineers’ data showed back at the factory.
There’s always a time gap between what they’re working on at headquarters and what their star driver experiences on race day.
Here’s the bad news for Verstappen and teammate Liam Lawson: Waché says these problems won’t completely go away in 2025.
"Theory and practice never perfectly match up," he explains.
Making things even tougher, F1’s rules aren’t changing much next year. That means finding ways to make the car faster gets harder and harder.
"Your tools need to be more and more precise," Waché says.
But there’s a silver lining – Ferrari, McLaren, and Mercedes are all dealing with the same challenges.
Waché leaves us with some wisdom: "It’s dangerous to trust the system blindly. You’ve got to keep everything in perspective and remember that track performance never exactly matches your tests."
