McLaren’s hot start has Red Bull playing catch-up, and Jan Lammers thinks it’s a serious problem for Max Verstappen‘s team.
The papaya squad grabbed wins in the first two Grand Prix weekends while Red Bull—especially in China—could only follow behind. Can Verstappen’s team close the gap? For now, Lammers sees McLaren with a massive advantage.
Will Max still become champion in 2025?
“If Max thinks it’s still possible, it’s still possible,” Lammers told GPblog. “At the end of the day, you are who you think you are. So if Max sees himself still having a chance…”
But defending the title looks like a really tough job right now. In the opening races, Red Bull clearly fell short against Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri‘s McLarens.
“Look, the way it is now, at least it won’t stay that way,” Lammers believes. “So either it’s going to get much worse at Red Bull, or it’s going to improve. But this is not the picture that’s going to remain all year.”
## McLaren’s advantage
The former driver thinks Red Bull has a huge problem compared to McLaren.
“A huge strength and advantage for McLaren are that they have two cars and two drivers who constantly come through all practice with very valuable feedback, with data and their comments. Then they also race, where a lot of relevant data always comes out.”
“With Max, of course valuable data has been collected, but with Liam [Lawson] not really. Because the data from his qualifying, you can’t do much with that.”
Lawson struggled badly in China, finishing dead last in P20 for both the sprint race and Sunday’s main event.
“You can only really diagnose a car if it is driven the way it should be driven. If a driver is still searching, you do get data and feedback, but that’s not really relevant feedback that you can use.”
“That makes the gap that was obviously already there grow even bigger after such a race,” Lammers said.
