What Red Bull ‘rediscovered’ at Monza that suggests Max Verstappen’s latest win wasn’t a ‘one-off’

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Max Verstappen’s victory at the Italian Grand Prix on Sunday had shades of his former dominance in F1 as he took the chequered flag nearly 20 seconds ahead of his closest rival.

After briefly taking the lead in the opening laps, Lando Norris was unable to compete with Verstappen as he superbly retook the lead on lap four.

The overtake from Verstappen was applauded in the paddock, with teams, journalists and fans all appreciating the move, which helped the reigning world champion take his first win of 2025 since the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix in May.

Verstappen’s feat was aided by a gamble taken by Red Bull to run a lower-downforce rear wing on his RB21.

The Dutchman set a new lap record at Monza, as well as completing the race in just one hour and 13 minutes to set another record for the quickest F1 race in the history of the sport.

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Red Bull’s new upgrade ‘completely changed’ the balance issues that Max Verstappen has faced with the RB21

Another aspect of their weekend that aided Verstappen was the fact that Red Bull introduced a new floor at the Italian Grand Prix.

It is likely to be their final significant upgrade before turning their attention completely to the new 2026 F1 regulations.

The changes were designed to improve pressure distribution across the underbody of the RB21 in hopes of improving performance from the increased load that could be utilised.

Speaking on a podcast from RacingNews365, journalist Ian Parkes noted why the upgrade means that Verstappen’s feat at Monza isn’t just a one-off as we look ahead to the style of tracks that are still to come on the calendar.

“You should never write Max Verstappen and Red Bull off, because we had done and then all of a sudden they introduced these new floor new elements and it just completely changed the aero grip and balance,” Parkes said.

“Pierre Wache, the technical director, had turned around and said that is what had been lacking on that car this season. They’ve now rediscovered that, to a certain extent, and that really played its part as we all saw in Max’s incredible pole position and race-winning times, which were all-time Formula 1 records.

The good news, as we discussed over the update at various stages following practice on Friday, was that this is not going to be a one-off.

“This floor has now proven itself to actually be more performant than Red Bull was expecting. For all intents and purposes, it should be good around Baku, which is a predominantly low-downforce circuit.”

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Key learnings at Zandvoort aided Red Bull in bringing the upgrade to Monza

Red Bull found an ‘extreme’ balance shift on the RB21 at last week’s Grand Prix in Zandvoort. The team came away from the weekend, which saw Verstappen finish second, with a number of lessons learnt that they hoped to resolve in time for Monza.

The floor upgrade seems to have sorted the issue out. Previously, Verstappen had to contend with oversteer on corner entry and understeer on the exit, so with the balance now figured out, a lot of potential can be extracted from the car.

The success may have secured Wache’s position at Red Bull after the French engineer was coming under increasing pressure over the performance of the team in the current campaign.

Verstappen himself has been critical of the technical director in the past and stopped short of giving Wache some credit for the changes made in his post-race media session with journalists.

The team still find themselves in fourth place in the constructors’ standings, 21 points behind their closest rivals Mercedes. Incredibly, Verstappen has scored 230 of those points as Yuki Tsunoda failed to bring home any points for the 10th time this season with Red Bull.