JEDDAH – Ailing Red Bull arrive on the Red Sea for this weekend’s Saudi Arabian Grand Prix in Jeddah desperate to prevent their 2025 season sinking into mediocrity.

The Austrian Formula One giants left Bahrain last week in sombre mood, their limitations laid bare under the harsh floodlights in the desert of Sakhir.

Here are the issues that threaten to derail Max Verstappen’s quest for a fifth successive world title.

1. The state of play

Verstappen slipped to third in the drivers’ standings – eight points behind McLaren’s leader Lando Norris – after trailing in sixth and over half a minute behind Norris’ teammate Oscar Piastri who won in Bahrain.

The Dutchman has accounted for all bar two of the team’s tally in the constructors’ championship where they are lagging a massive 80 points behind runaway leaders McLaren after just four races.

2. Crisis talks

As McLaren celebrated their third win from four in Sakhir, Red Bull convened a crisis meeting involving their top brass.

Team principal Christian Horner, influential advisor Helmut Marko, technical director Pierre Wache, and chief engineer Paul Monaghan met to mull over the team’s plight.

Horner, in a post-race media encounter, had offered a blunt appraisal of where they were at.

“This race has exposed some pitfalls that are obviously very clear that we need to get on top of very quickly,” he said.

“We understand where the issues are, it’s introducing the solutions that obviously takes a little more time.”

Verstappen, who was plum last at one stage in Bahrain, lamented that “basically everything went wrong”.

“It’s of course not what we want, but it’s just where we are at with our car and the tyre behaviour that we have with the car. Everything is just highlighted even more on a track like this,” he said.

3. One-man band

Red Bull would be in even worse shape if it was not for Verstappen’s combative brilliance in cajoling a problematic car to fight with quicker rivals like McLaren and Mercedes.

His win in Japan in the first leg of April’s triple header was only down to arguably his greatest-ever qualifying performance.

The machine’s idiosyncracies proved too tough a riddle to solve for the unfortunate Liam Lawson, who was unceremoniously dropped to their sister team RB after just two races.

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