The wing that keeps putting Verstappen in the gravel

Red Bull’s rotating rear wing has failed twice in three race weekends. The FIA is now asking questions — and Milton Keynes may have to answer with a redesign.

Two crashes in three weekends is not a coincidence, and Red Bull knows it. Max Verstappen spun off during qualifying at the Red Bull Ring, then did it again at Silverstone six laps from the flag — both times because the team’s rotating rear wing failed to snap back into cornering mode quickly enough.

The part in question is Red Bull’s take on the so-called “Macarena wing”, an active-aero idea Ferrari pioneered first: the upper plane rotates through a wide arc to cut drag on the straights, then flips back for downforce through the corners. Red Bull’s version rotates the opposite way to Ferrari’s and has been in the car since Miami — six race weekends of running before the failures started.

At Silverstone it cost Verstappen a podium that had looked achievable on pure pace. Running third with six laps to go, the wing didn’t reattach heading into the high-speed Stowe corner, the rear end lost downforce mid-turn, and he was in the gravel before he could catch it.

“It’s super dangerous, because you can really hurt yourself, two times.”

Team principal Laurent Mekies didn’t dispute the diagnosis. Red Bull says it understood the cause of the Austria failure but is now dealing with a different fault, and has opened a full review of the wing rather than treating the two incidents as unrelated one-offs. Reverting to a more conventional, non-rotating wing for Spa remains on the table — a step back in outright drag reduction, but the team has said safety takes priority over performance if any doubt remains.

The FIA isn’t waiting for Red Bull to finish that review alone. Both Red Bull and Ferrari are now in direct talks with the governing body over the safety margins of their rotating-wing designs, since the rules require the mechanism to fail safely back into cornering position rather than fail open. McLaren has built its own version too, but has yet to risk racing it.

Spa is the test that matters. It’s one of the highest-speed circuits on the calendar, and Red Bull has a two-week window to prove the wing is fixed — or shelve one of its biggest aerodynamic gains of the season, right as Verstappen’s patience with the car is visibly wearing thin.