Max Verstappen has admitted Red Bull's pace "is a bit alarming" after he was unable to stop Lando Norris dominating the Dutch Grand Prix.
Norris overcame a poor start to beat Verstappen by nearly 23 seconds on Sunday at Zandvoort, also setting the fastest lap of the race on the final lap to score an extra point.
Verstappen still leads Norris by 70 points in the Drivers' Championship with nine events to go but hasn't won any of the last five races - his longest winless streak since 2020.
"The last few races haven't been fantastic. That in a sense was a bit alarming," said Verstappen.
"We don't need to panic but are trying to improve the situation. That's what we are working on but F1 is very complicated.
"Something in the car has made it more difficult to drive and it's very hard to pinpoint that at the moment. That's hurting our one lap performance and long run [pace]."
Norris, who is in his first F1 title fight, also beat Verstappen by over three tenths in qualifying and had better tyre degradation in the race.
McLaren brought upgrades to Zandvoort and appear to be continuing their upward trend from before the summer.
However, Red Bull will be concerned about how far Verstappen finished behind Norris on a track the Dutchman previously had a perfect record at, plus the ease of which Norris overtook the championship leader.
"I'm not surprised with how my feeling was in the car. I couldn't do anything. Everything I tried to do...I said it during the race, whatever I do with the car, the inputs are not really translating," Verstappen told Sky Sports F1.
"When I steer left, it doesn't feel like it does immediately. Or it just doesn't turn how I want to. It's very complicated to understand that why that is and how we fix that.
"The positive was the start but quite early on in that stint, Lando was waiting for the opportunity. I degged a bit and couldn't make the tyres work. He came by and from that point onwards, I was focused on bring it to the end in the best possible position."
Asked if the RB20 is the most difficult car he's driven in F1, he added: "It's not the easiest! There's a few things we are looking at and hopefully we can improve the situation quickly. But only time will tell."
Red Bull run different cars at Zandvoort
Red Bull's lead in the Constructors' Championship is down to 30 points over McLaren as Oscar Piastri finished fourth and Sergio Perez was sixth.
Having won four of the opening five events, Red Bull may have gone down the wrong development path during the European leg of the F1 season, which started back in May.
It's one explanation for their lack of pace and team principal Christian Horner revealed Verstappen and Perez ran different car specifications in the Netherlands to understand their issues.
"McLaren were very fast today. All credit to them. We took a bit of a gamble because we thought the degradation would be quite high, so we went up on the downforce level to maximum downforce," he said.
"If the degradation was high, we thought it would help. In the end, it turned out to be low and it made us slow on the straights with Max.
"The benefit is we ran both cars with different specs, so we have taken a lot of data. It's important we understand and use that data. Max is very clear on where we need to improve."
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