Red Bull cancel Singapore GP plans as Christian Horner oversees Azerbaijan ‘post-mortem’

Red Bull have cancelled plans to give their cars a special livery at the Singapore Grand Prix due to performance concerns.

Max Verstappen and team-mate Sergio Perez were due to race in bespoke designs under the lights at the Marina Bay street circuit. Sunday’s race is of great importance, though, and Red Bull can’t afford any further setbacks after a nightmare Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

Three-time world champion Verstappen only managed P5 after being overtaken by drivers’ championship rival Lando Norris while Perez crashed out on the penultimate lap as he pushed for a podium place alongside Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz. The pair’s combined woes resulted in McLaren moving top of the constructors’ championship standings for the first time in 2024.

Red Bull have had issues with their RB20 over the past few months but earlier this year, the Milton Keynes-based team had invited its followers to come up with livery designs that would be run at the British, Singapore and USA Grands Prix this season. But the designs add a small amount of weight, costing them around 0.03 seconds per lap, and Red Bull don’t want to take any chances.

In a statement released on Wednesday morning, the team said: While it was relatively easy to understand how futuristic REBL CUSTMS designs might look like in an RB20 type car, some of the full car takeover liveries we designed and painted on T-shirt and card models proved difficult in practice, at least in terms of the weight added to the actual RB20 body work.

“I am sure you can imagine that added weight degrades performance and the team are still trying to make this car as competitive as possible for the rest of the 2024 season That is why it is with great regret that I have to inform you that the team has not decided to forgo running the REBL CUSTMS livery on the RB20 at the Singapore and United States Gps.

While Marina Bay was deemed the toughest circuit for Red Bull last year, Horner would be expecting Verstappen and Perez to be much happier at the end of this weekend than they were in Singapore. Horner expected a ‘big post-mortem’ into their ongoing difficulties and admitted that Red Bull ‘have to get our head around’ the problems that the RB20 is encountering even if they have brought revisions to Baku.

‘I believe there will be a huge post mortem to see what the differences between the two cars are and they are quite close really.’ However, Raikkonen was not as confident as Checo [Perez] was today so clearly there needs to be an investigation as to why.

‘I think Max, well of course, we have got to look at these variances and set up here, he was not as happy with his car as Checo was,’ ‘But if we take Checo as the benchmark here, I think that we have come forward,’ ‘Again I just think we need to understand the differences and then try to progress again.’