Red Bull: Radio faults fixable this year, but start issues linger into 2027

Max Verstappen claimed another podium finish at the United States Grand Prix, yet there was little celebration inside Red Bull's Austin garage once the chequered flag fell.

Team members conceded in the paddock that Mercedes' Kimi Antonelli had race pace nobody could live with on Sunday, but both Red Bull drivers were left frustrated that the team had not extracted everything available from its car at the Circuit of the Americas.

Some of that frustration was specific to the race itself. Verstappen was unhappy with strategy calls, particularly the decision to stay on softer compounds when the harder tyres appeared to be working better, and the power unit behaved inconsistently through the afternoon.

But the deeper issue was a pair of recurring problems that have dogged Red Bull throughout the season: weak starts and unreliable team radio.

Isack Hadjar put it bluntly to media including Motorsport.com. "At the moment, it's the little things we can't do. I have poor radio, I don't even know what's happening. And whenever I drop the clutch, it's going into a nightmare. If we fix these two issues, we might already be on the podium. It seems like we can do the hardest things, but we can't do the silly things."

The "hardest things" Hadjar referred to was Red Bull's turnaround in outright pace. According to figures cited by Autosport and Yahoo Sports, the team's race-pace deficit to the front of the field averaged 1.2 seconds per lap across Australia, China and Japan earlier in the season, a gap it has since largely closed.

Asked about Hadjar's comments, team principal Laurent Mekies told Motorsport.com the radio and start problems needed to be treated as separate challenges. "I guess there are two different ways to answer your question," he said.

"I think there is some truth in what Isack is saying, meaning that we are all frustrated to struggle with radio issues for the second race in a row. It's making everyone's lives very difficult, so it is true that it's something that we would like to fix quite quickly, because it's an item that should be working without using too much of our energy. So he's right on that one. The start is a slightly more complex issue to solve."

Both drivers suffered radio trouble in Austin, the first time this season Hadjar had been affected. Verstappen has endured it more often, including in Singapore, where race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase could not hear him and the pair had to resort to coded messages. In Texas, Verstappen struggled to hear stand-in engineer Tom Hart, who Mekies said had otherwise done a strong job covering for Lambiase.

Red Bull admits it still does not have a full explanation for the radio faults, though Mekies believes a fix should not be especially difficult. "If we were understanding it, we would have solved it. We don't fully understand why we are being hit by these issues. I have to admit that the competition is doing a better job than us because we can hear everyone's radio and we have been struggling more than what we would have liked to."

The start problem is a different matter. Hadjar has argued the clutch itself needs redesigning, saying he follows the correct procedures but finds it too sensitive. Mekies disputed that it was so straightforward, saying the issue stems from a broader range of factors rather than a single component, and that a proper hardware solution will not arrive until 2027.

Red Bull now turns to its next outing on the calendar looking to close out the radio gremlins before the season ends, while accepting that the launch problems troubling both Verstappen and Hadjar are set to persist for at least one more year.