It is one of the more intriguing hypotheticals of the 2025 Formula 1 season: how would Max Verstappen fare if he were not driving for Red Bull Racing, but instead for Racing Bulls? Especially given that experts like Ralf Schumacher believe the junior team has “a better base this year than Red Bull.”
“I’d almost go as far as saying Max could theoretically fight for the championship with that car,” the Sky pundit declared in the latest episode of the Backstage Boxengasse podcast. His reasoning: “The car is simply broader in its scope, so you can make it work on every circuit.”
Schumacher further speculates that Verstappen could bring all of his experience to Racing Bulls, and that the technical development of the car “might have taken a very different course” with him on board.
If you compare the lower-placed cars of each team in the championship, the raw numbers back Schumacher’s theory: Liam Lawson has scored 20 points for the Racing Bulls so far, while Yuki Tsunoda has managed only nine for Red Bull Racing.
The reason Red Bull have not even contemplated a Verstappen test in the VCARB 02 is clear: rivals are keeping a very close eye on whether the two teams, which are both owned by Red Bull GmbH, truly operate independently. A Verstappen outing in the junior team would undermine Red Bull’s assertion that the two outfits are run separately.
David Coulthard doubts a Verstappen test would yield much anyway, as he said at a More Than Equal event in Zandvoort last week: “They’ve got data. The data is based on all of the factual information. So, they will know how the two cars compare from all that information.
Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing, Isack Hadjar, Racing Bulls
Photo by: Mark Thompson – Getty Images
“They’ll know how the two cars are performing using all of that data. The only thing they don’t have is Max’s input in terms of whether he would be half a second quicker in the RB, or maybe the car doesn’t suit him.”
That Verstappen would excel at Racing Bulls, however, Coulthard has no doubt: “It would only take Max two laps to get the maximum out of any of those cars.
“I think he would perform like he does in any car. Blindingly fast and very difficult for his team-mate to beat him.”
Helmut Marko, though, has always crushed such hypotheticals at the root. Asked if Red Bull had ever considered putting Verstappen in the VCARB 02, his answer was an immediate “no”.
In his view, nothing could be learned from it. The designs of the two cars are simply too different.
“You know, where the cars are coming from is too different for anyone to transfer anything from a car to another,” Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies told Sky.
Laurent Mekies, Team Principal, Red Bull Racing
Photo by: Clive Rose / Getty Images
“It’s what Formula 1 is today. You know, it’s 10 independent teams all coming with their own ideas about where to develop the car, what difficulties they found along the way, which development paths that they have ended up having due to that. And there is nothing you could take from a car to another. It’s really down to how it was developed from early on.”
What is true, however – as television commentators and media reports often point out – is that Racing Bulls appears to have the more forgiving car compared to the Red Bull. The RB21 may possess the higher peak potential, but it operates within a much narrower window. And so far, Verstappen alone seems truly capable of handling that knife-edge.
Alan Permane, Mekies’ successor at Racing Bulls, offers a nuanced counterpoint: “Much has been made of it being an easy car to drive. A lot of people have spoken about that, and they see how the drivers cope with it. But actually, what I think it is, is that it’s an easy car for the engineers to get in the optimum window aerodynamically. We can do what we need to do with the setup and extract the most from it, which just gives us performance.
“We need to get the setup right, the drivers need to be performing right, the car needs to be suited to the circuit, and then we can be top.”
In Zandvoort, Hadjar finished less than two seconds behind Verstappen after 72 laps. Naturally, many are asking: might Verstappen have done an even better job in the junior team’s car?
Permane rejects the notion that the VCARB 02 is, by its very DNA, a rookie-friendly machine.
“No, I don’t think so, honestly,” he explained. “I think it’s what we discovered over the winter from last year to this year. We made a car, and you’re right, it undoubtedly helps when you have rookie drivers, but I suspect it’s a car that a top-line driver would also find comfortable to drive and would also be able to extract the performance from.”
The tantalising fantasy of many fans – seeing Verstappen in a VCARB 02 – will thus remain just that: a fantasy. Even if Red Bull bosses might secretly like to try it for reference, such a test would immediately call into question the supposed independence of the two teams – and is therefore, in practice, impossible.
That wasn’t always the case, incidentally. In September 1997, Michael Schumacher, already a Ferrari works driver, tested a Sauber C16 at Fiorano. Sauber wanted his input on the car, and both Schumacher and Ferrari agreed, partly because Sauber was then a Ferrari engine customer.
Back then, the independence of the teams was simply not the focal issue it has become nearly three decades later.
Additional reporting by Ronald Vording and Erwin Jaeggi.
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