For all his blistering pace displayed in Miami, Max Verstappen is fast approaching F1's grid penalty zone, with Red Bull unexpectedly adding a third gearbox to the Dutchman's 2023 pool of hardware ahead of Saturday's qualifying.
A fourth gearbox would put the current leader of the F1 world championship on the limit of the authorized allocation, which a fifth element earning Verstappen a grid drop.
The component appears to be an Achilles Heel on Red Bull's RB19, given that the team is only four races into its season and has already pulled three transmissions out of its store of parts.
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Verstappen took his second gearbox in Jeddah, but now, with 19 rounds to go, its almost a certainty that a fifth element will need to be introduced at some stage, unless Red Bull can salvage working parts from its other gearbox casings, the state of which is unknown.
So far, Red Bull has offered to date no explanation for the successive hardware changes.
Over at Ferrari, Carlos Sainz was also given a new gearbox for the weekend – his second this season.
Furthermore, new penalty-free Control Electronics (CE) and Energy Stores (ES) were added to the hardware inventories of McLaren's Lando Norris, Williams' Alex Albon and Aston Martin's Lance Stroll.
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