A bad weekend for Red Bull but a great one for the fans

The Miami Grand Prix is an odd one. It’s one of those all-singing, all-dancing, slightly schizophrenic events that don’t quite know whether it’s a motor race or a music festival.

That’s great if you’re a paying punter there for the noise of cars or the bray of jiggling singers of horribly repetitive lyrics backed by horribly repetitive chords. Not so great if you are there as a hack to report something and to do so preferably without a thumping beat echoing endlessly in your head.

But… well, when you’ve been to the grandly named Miami International Autodrome you know you’ve been to An Event afterwards.

In all fairness, this year’s offering was a real humdinger. It started with a sprint race in which Max Verstappen was his usual robust self taking the lead from brilliant, youngest-ever pole-sitter Kimi Antonelli before Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri pushed their McLarens past him and Lewis Hamilton cheered his supporters – and himself – by completing the podium.

Then there was the grand prix itself, where… yep, you guessed it, Oscar and Lando did it all over again, albeit in reverse order. And this time George Russell completed the podium as Verstappen had to settle for a disgruntled fourth.

But the new father – his partner Kelly gave birth late last week to their daughter Lily – was nowhere near as disgruntled as Red Bull’s hierarchy. It was a tough weekend for them, on and off the track.

It began when McLaren boss Zak Brown carried a bottle to the pit wall, ostentatiously labelled “tyre water”. Red Bull, it seems, have been alleging that McLaren are adding water to their cars’ tyres – inside them, that is – in order to keep their critical temperatures within limits because it cools them and enhances their life and performance.

Thermal images were said to exist which proved this, though nobody vouchsafed how, or indeed when, one might avail oneself of this dubious bit of engineering sleight of hand.

And when might you add that water, assuming you could figure out how to do it? In tyres soon to be fitted during a pit stop? In which case, surely, you would want them to be up to temperature rather than being cooled down (unless it was hot water). And how might one perform this task invisibly?

This took me back to my F3 days in 1985 when the late Gerrit van Kouwen won three races in the summer in Brian de Zille’s Pegasus Motorsport. They were a team with a strong crew – notably engineer Trevor Foster, formerly of Shadow and Tyrrell, and later Jordan F1 – so for me, it wasn’t a surprise they could beat the other star teams.

But rumours began that there was something shonky with the VW engine. The most ridiculously fanciful allegation was that the inlet manifold was attached to the cylinder head with special bolts which expanded when hot, thereby letting more air into the engine than the mandatory restrictor was designed to admit, and therefore boosting its power.

Back to 2025. F1 engineers, being as clever as they undoubtedly are, I’m sure somebody could work something out to add water inside the tyres. But I agree with Brown when he suggested that such frivolous allegations are intended as a disruptive nuisance, and should be banned.

And that the system should be changed such that, if you wanted to make them in a serious rather than a nuisance manner, you should put down, say, £25,000 (S$45,000), and officially lodge your written protest. And if the ruling went against you, that £25,000 would be deducted from your cost cap allowance.

Then there was Red Bull’s protest that Mercedes’ Russell had been speeding during the race’s second virtual safety car deployment. The long-suffering stewards – Felix Holter, Mathieu Remmerie, Derek Warwick and Steve Pence – took a long time checking myriad empirical measurements before throwing out the protest and keeping the fee, confirming that the Briton did nothing illegal.

It was thus a doubly bad weekend for Red Bull and another great one for McLaren.

But also a real tonic for F1 and fans in general because there was so much wheel-to-wheel, non-contact racing that it made one celebrate all over again why we love racing – and why those who can do it, do it, and those who can’t, write about it.