Red Bull boss Laurent Mekies has explained why the team’s issues with its 2025 Formula 1 car cannot be solved by replicating sister team Racing Bulls.
The Milton Keynes-based squad laboured to a disappointing result in the Hungarian Grand Prix, with Max Verstappen finishing ninth after starting seventh.
Former team-mate Liam Lawson, meanwhile, managed to bag eighth place in the VCARB 02, which has been a consistent points-finishing car across the campaign.
Earlier in the season, former Red Bull and Racing Bulls [then Toro Rosso] driver Alex Albon commented on the differences between the two teams’ cars being prevalent.
The Anglo-Thai driver commented that the satellite team’s cars are “well balanced” and “very stable“, adding that the current Red Bull model is “on a knife edge”.
This has naturally led to questions being asked about whether some aspects of the car could be translated into the RB21, but Mekies has refuted such a possibility.
“No, I think the question is fair, but there’s a genesis of the car,” the Frenchman told media including Motorsport Week.
“Where the cars are coming from is too different for anyone to transfer anything from a car to another. It’s what Formula 1 is today.
“You know, it’s 10 independent teams all coming with their own ideas about where to develop the car, what difficulties they found along the way, which development paths they have ended up having due to that.
“And there is nothing you could take from a car to another. It’s really down to how it was developed from early on.”
Verstappen experience essential to Red Bull improvement
When Albon made his comments over the Canadian Grand Prix weekend, he also alluded to how Verstappen might be the only driver capable of taming the RB21.
Mekies corroborated this, saying his experience is essential when it comes to understanding the car.
“It’s a huge advantage because he knows when the car has been working. He knows when the car has not been working,” he explaned.
“And especially in a situation like that where it’s not so much a balance issue, it’s really like we are struggling to find the level of grip we should be having here. And he’s certainly been a huge, huge help in these situations.”
Mekies revealed that the team tried different things to improve the car at the Hungaroring, but ultimately, the experiments failed.
“What I can tell you is that it was there from the first lap in FP1. We look at each other and we say, what’s going on?” he recalled.
“We could see in all the slow-speed, medium-speed [corners], we are just very slow. It was something, we couldn’t say that it was balance-related.
“We felt that we couldn’t put the car in the right window, we couldn’t switch on the tyres. Sometimes it happens in FP1, but not in that magnitude.
“It felt wrong from the beginning and we tried very many things.”
The new Red Bull boss added that different things were tried on both Verstappen and Yuki Tsunoda’s cars, but came up short in every eventuality.
“The good thing is that the guys really went out and tried with both cars different things,” he continued. “It didn’t do any difference, we couldn’t switch on the tyres.
“Long run, short run, sometimes it makes you get – by luck or by merit – in the right window, but it never quite happened. And it was like that in qualifying.
“Of course, you can always look at your best sample and think that this was actually alright. But the truth is, on average, it never quite came back.
“I think it’s been a theme this year to say that the window is narrow – and sometimes very narrow. I think today was a lot more than that.
“Today we were really unable to get the car to run.”
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