Red Bull's technical leadership isn't pulling any punches about the mess they're in. Max Verstappen has been vocal about his car degrading as races and practice sessions progress, and now the team's technical director Pierre Wache has basically admitted they don't have a quick fix coming. Speaking after Thursday's practice in Baku, Wache was pretty blunt when asked if he was confident about solving the issue before 2027. His answer? Basically a no.

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The problem is massive, according to Wache himself. He explained that whenever Red Bull try to tweak the setup to improve one area, they end up compromising something else. It's a classic engineering nightmare where every solution creates new headaches. What makes it worse is that this isn't some new niggle that popped up recently. Verstappen's been dealing with this degradation problem for a while now, and team principal Laurent Mekies confirmed in Madrid that it's something that's probably going to stick around through the entire 2027 season. They're working on it, but there's no magic bullet coming.

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Red Bull have already made the call to shift their development focus fully to 2027, with the Baku upgrade package being their last significant update for this year. It's a gamble moving resources away early, but when you're wrestling with this kind of fundamental issue, sometimes you've got to make tough choices. The silver lining is that they managed to bag a double podium in Azerbaijan anyway, with Verstappen finishing P2 behind George Russell. Still, that result came with help from Russell's late turbo trouble and a couple of safety car periods, so Red Bull were actually nowhere near as quick as that result suggested.

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On the constructors' championship front, Red Bull did claw back some ground on McLaren, cutting a 76-point deficit down to 43 points heading to Malaysia. They're now 43 points behind McLaren in third place, with Mercedes and Ferrari running away at the front. But until Wache and his crew figure out how to stop the car falling apart as the weekend goes on, Verstappen's going to keep fighting an uphill battle against a fundamental weakness that shouldn't even be there.

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