After a reasonably strong start, VCARB lost out in last year’s development war. As Haas and Alpine made improvements, the Faenza team were pushed down to 8th in the standings. With the 2025 season on the horizon, VCARB could struggle in the midfield.
Competition for VCARB intensifies
In the opening third of 2024, VCARB were leading the way in the midfield. Yuki Tsunoda was regularly in the points and in Q3, putting together a series of strong performance for Laurent Mekies’ squad.
With Aston Martin’s Imola upgrades triggering a decline in performance, the Faenza team were briefly arriving to race weekends with optimism of being the fifth-fastest team.
Unfortunately for the Red Bull sister team, things gradually worsened as time progressed.
Haas’ Silverstone upgrades unlocked a significant step forward, whilst Alpine managed to recover from their underwhelming start in Bahrain.
Weight-saving measures put Alpine back in contention for points, even if their improvements were overshadowed by the team’s deteriorating relationship with Esteban Ocon.
Regardless, VCARB found themselves sliding down the pecking order. In a similar fashion to Red Bull, their mid-season upgrades failed to yield the anticipated results.
For all the attention on Yuki Tsunoda on Daniel Ricciardo’s head-to-head, the Faenza pairing found themselves in machinery that made points difficult.
In the context of the top four’s clear advantage over the midfield, VCARB struggled to compete.
Aside from a stand-out weekend in Brazil (helped by Tsunoda and Lawson’s strong performances in wet conditions), they were largely anonymous to end the season
Their fate is tied to Red Bull
Perhaps the biggest concern for the Italian outfit is their potential for growth. On paper, Red Bull’s dominance in previous years gave VCARB plenty of advantages.
However, Laurent Mekies’ squad did not begin to truly tighten its collaboration with the Milton Keynes team until halfway through 2023.
Ironically, this process of increased collaboration began when Red Bull’s advantage over the field declined.
Christian Horner was open about the difficulties being encountered in unlocking more performance in the wind tunnel. To some extent, their results in 2022 and 2023 overshadowed their limitations.
Last year saw Red Bull’s typically bullet-proof development programme hit a standstill, and this seemed to impact their second team.
On a more macro scale, VCARB find themselves in an increasingly competitive midfield group.
Sauber and Wlliams are receiving substantial investment to improve their results – which is likely to pay off over the next eighteen months.
In many ways, Williams sacrificed their 2024 campaign to implement infrastructural changes behind the scenes to put them in a better position for the long-term.
Aston Martin and Alpine, meanwhile, are two teams that underachieved last season – yet still finished several points ahead of VCARB.
The only team with a comparable model to the Faenza outfit is Haas, but this is slowly changing.
Ayao Komatsu’s squad has secured a landmark partnership with Toyota, which (alongside financial investment from gene Haas) will give them more firepower to work with.
Even putting aside the big picture aspirations at Haas, their upgrade programme last year was far more effective than anticipated.
Assuming they can maintain their trajectory, VCARB will struggle to improve their finishing position from last year.
