Red Bull is working tirelessly and exploring every possible avenue to recover from the team's current drop in performance.
McLaren overtook the reigning champions in Baku and now holds a 20-point lead in the constructors' standings, which Dr. Helmut Marko believes will be incredibly hard to overcome.
"It will be difficult," the team advisor told Bild newspaper.
"McLaren has a car that works on every track. We have to focus on Max (Verstappen) and the drivers' championship."
Verstappen remains 59 points ahead of Lando Norris in the drivers' standings, and the team is determined to maintain this lead at all costs.
As an example, while Red Bull's sister team RB is running a special denim-inspired livery in Singapore this weekend, Red Bull Racing has abandoned its own special livery plan due to the additional weight of the paint.
Red Bull revealed to Auto Motor und Sport in Germany that their planned livery for Singapore would have added an extra kilogram to the car, which Bild calculated as only costing around 0.03 seconds per lap.
Marko believes Red Bull is already beginning to move past the current performance slump.
"With this generation of cars, it's such a delicate balance that a single misstep can make the car dramatically worse," he explained. "It happened to Ferrari, it's happened to Aston Martin, and now it's happened to us.
"But thank God we have recognised the mistake and are on the way to correcting it."
Marko also admitted that the loss of key staff, including Adrian Newey and Jonathan Wheatley, has played a role in the team's current challenges.
To mitigate the departure of sporting director Wheatley, Verstappen's race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase will now also serve as 'head of racing,' while other internal promotions will fill additional gaps.
"We must not forget that a few very good employees have left us," Marko said. "Success simply arouses desire, but the truth is that we can only fill every top position in management or engineering once.
We have to allow people to accept that other teams can offer them a better position with more money.
"We just have to make sure that the structure stays together," the Austrian added.
Former F1 driver Ralf Schumacher pointed to Christian Horner's decision to remain in his position following a scandal earlier in 2024. "Christian said 'people can leave if they want'," Schumacher told Sky Deutschland. "'We're so strong as a team, we can absorb it'.
"That was a classic misjudgement, as we can see now."
Former Red Bull driver Robert Doornbos believes that the team's budget is under strain, made worse by Sergio Perez's significant crash in Baku with the updated RB20.
"There's a lot of work for Red Bull and the design team and at the same time a lot of headache," Doornbos said on his YouTube channel, "because the damage from Perez all comes out of the development budget."
However, Dutch former F1 driver Giedo van der Garde still backs Verstappen to secure his fourth consecutive drivers' championship by the end of the season.
"If the car does not get better, he will become champion due to his mentality," van der Garde told DRS De Race Show.
"Max has serious experience and he understands exactly how to win the title.
And what happens if Lando and Max are fighting for the title in the last lap? Will he take Norris out? I won't say that's what will happen, but in my opinion, Max could do that if the title is at stake."
