Lap 27. Monaco, 2018. Daniel Ricciardo’s engineer comes over the radio with the kind of message that ends race leads: the MGU-K is failing. The hybrid energy system that gives a Formula 1 car its surge out of slow corners — gone, with fifty laps still to run on streets where former Red Bull talisman Sebastian Vettel is already filling mirrors in his Ferrari. Most drivers start calculating damage limitation. The honey-badger starts working the steering wheel, thumb controls mapping out a manual workaround, lap by lap, rationing the power that remains. He’d been robbed here before — led from pole in 2016 while his own pit wall botched the stop and gave the win away. Not this time. Not here. Not again.
That’s what Red Bull at Monaco looks like. Or looked like.
Red Bulls Woes in 2026
Right now, in April 2026, the team that has been the dominant force in Formula One since 2021 is fighting for relevancy. New regulations rewrote the rulebook over the winter, and the RB21 hasn’t found any answers whatsoever. Both their superstar lead driver, Max Verstappen, and the man tasked with that cursed second seat, Isack Hadjar, are barely fighting for points. Verstappen came within a point of the greatest championship comeback ever last season, a comeback that almost culminated with his fifth straight world title. Now, the garage that used to celebrate with pool parties on seemingly every alternate Sunday is running strategy calls just to salvage a top-ten finish.
Online betting sites are acutely aware of just how far the mighty have fallen. The 2026 Monaco GP Odds haven’t yet been posted as the bookies wait to see what happens in Miami and Montreal before rolling out their offering. They have, however, posted their championship odds, and where George Russell and Kimi Antonelli are considered the frontrunners at even money and 11/10 respectively, Verstappen is all the way out at 50/1, even though he has contested for each of the last five titles, winning four of them.
History says that Red Bull will find their way back to the front of the grid. But will that return to form come in the Principality? If former narratives are anything to go by, it is certainly a possibility. Here is every Red Bull driver to win the Monaco Grand Prix.
Mark Webber
Fresh off a win at the 2010 Spanish Grand Prix, Mark Webber catapulted himself to the forefront of a championship wide open between Red Bull, McLaren, and Ferrari. He followed up his exploits in Catalonia with pole position in Monaco in the most important qualifying session on the calendar due to the lack of overtaking opportunities around the streets of Monte Carlo. He duly converted that pole into a composed, authoritative victory while the rest of the season’s contenders stumbled, putting himself level on points with teammate Vettel at the summit of the standings.
Two years later, however, Webber was very much a secondary figure in the Red Bull garage. He was pipped to the 2010 title by his younger teammate, who proceeded to romp to a second straight crown in 2011. The Aussie, however, was about to prove that he was far from a spent force at the front of the grid, and he did so at the crown jewel of the F1 calendar.
The campaign had already produced six different winners in seven races when Monaco arrived. The legendary Michael Schumacher had set the fastest qualifying lap but carried a grid penalty, handing Webber pole from one of the best single laps of the German’s comeback era. Webber led. The race looked manageable. Then, with four laps remaining, light rain started falling on Monaco’s streets, triggering chaos right through the pack.
Nico Rosberg began to close. Fernando Alonso was lurking beneath him. Vettel behind that. Four cars compressed into a pressure cooker on streets where there is physically nowhere to pass unless someone makes a mistake. Webber didn’t make one. Nerve over raw speed — he crossed the line first and delivered the drive of the season in a year full of memorable drives.
Sebastian Vettel
Four wins from five races before the 2011 Monaco Grand Prix. By this point, Vettel was in a league of his own as he hunted down a second straight title. He started second on the grid that year, not pole, but inherited the lead as strategy reshuffled through the one-stop and two-stop runners, then navigated a red flag and tire controversy that threw the race into chaos.
An early pit stop threatened his track position; a longer final stint on the option tire proved the correct call when the field compressed again. The headlines that weekend belonged entirely to Hamilton’s penalties and the stewards’ room drama. Vettel let them. He just banked the points, extended the lead, and continued his march to the crown.
Daniel Ricciardo
Back to that steering wheel in 2018. The MGU-K failure stripped Daniel Ricciardo of the hybrid power boost every modern Formula 1 car depends on to accelerate out of slow corners. At Monaco — a circuit built almost entirely of slow corners — that’s catastrophic. Vettel, on fresh rubber with a healthy Ferrari, began closing. The gap on the Red Bull pit wall timing screen started shrinking. Then Ricciardo’s engineers started talking him through it: adjust this setting, remap this deployment, protect the brakes here, nurse the system through the tunnel section.
He managed it manually for fifty laps. The gap stopped shrinking. Then it started growing. He won by around seven seconds — not because Vettel gave up, but because Ricciardo refused to. Redemption for 2016. A performance that belongs in the conversation about the greatest individual drives of the modern era.
Max Verstappen
Watch Max Verstappen on the timing screens in qualifying 2021 as Leclerc’s driveshaft surrenders. The Monégasque driver had taken pole at his home race, his moment. Then, he watched on in disbelief as his Ferrari refused to cooperate, engineers unable to fix a gearbox that Leclerc had slammed into the barriers 24 hours prior, a crash that sealed pole position. He was unable to start the race, and the curse had struck again.
Verstappen started second on the grid, but with no Leclerc ahead of him, he was crucially inheriting a clear road ahead. He would make the most of it, coolly driving to the checkered flag with a minimum of fuss to take the win and the championship lead.
But while that triumph was without drama, Verstappen’s win two years later was packed with it. Leading with ten laps left in the rain, he tagged the barrier at Casino Square. At Monaco. At speed. That contact — carbon fiber kissing concrete at 150km/h — is a fraction of a second that compresses an entire career into a single assessment: is the car intact, can I continue, do I stay out or do I pit?
The radio crackles. The engineers are asking. The gap to Alonso’s Aston Martin is the only margin that matters. Verstappen makes the call — stay out, the car’s alive, we finish this — and manages the final stint home without further incident. Clean win. The most dominant season in history still intact.
Sergio Pérez
Two red flags. A circuit submerged in standing water at the restart. Ferrari on pole with Leclerc and the momentum of his home crowd behind him. Monaco 2022 had all the ingredients for a Red Bull defeat — and then the Ferrari pit wall did what the Ferrari pit wall does, making a complete mess of Leclerc’s strategy.
The pole-sitter was in no man’s land out front, while Sergio Perez had boxed early for a set of intermediates, eaten into Leclerc’s lead from fourth place so much so that by the time the front three boxed themselves, he was ready and waiting to inherit the race lead. That’s the undercut for you: pit earlier than your rival, drive far faster than them while they’re on older — or simply the wrong — tires, and reap the rewards.
Pérez did exactly that. Once he had claimed the lead, neither Carlos Sainz, teammate Verstappen, nor the cursed Leclerc, now in fourth, could do anything about it. Strategic masterclass. Race won. Job done.
