Red Bull boss Laurent Mekies has expressed uncertainty over where the team stands heading into the second half of the Formula 1 season following a challenging Dutch GP.
The Austrian outfit lagged behind Mercedes, McLaren and Ferrari at the first race back after the summer break, with both Max Verstappen and Liam Lawson (stepping in for an injured Isack Hadjar) largely unable to trouble the top three teams.
An early exit for Verstappen in Sunday’s Grand Prix further soured the weekend for Red Bull. The four-time world champion lost the rear of his car on lap one and crashed heavily into the wall, leaving Lawson as the team’s sole competitor. The New Zealand driver finished the race in seventh place, more than a minute behind the top three drivers.
Mekies: Red Bull took “a step back” over the summer break
Mekies issued a damning assessment of the team’s result after the race, noting that there seemed to have been a regression in performance.
“Performance-wise, there is nowhere to hide,” he said. “It was a very difficult weekend.
“It seems like we have made a bit of a step back compared to where we were before the summer break.
“Of course, we’ll never know what the real pace of the car in the race would have been with Max, but it’s fair to say that session after session, it looked more difficult than it was in Budapest or in Spa or in Austria, so some tough work for us to do to regroup and to see if it is simply the competition that has done a better job than us at upgrading the car, or if something has been limiting us more than it should have been in Zandvoort.
“So that will be for us the next two weeks before we fight back in Monza all together.”
It’s expected that Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli will take a power unit change – and subsequently a grid penalty – at the next race in Monza, which could work in Red Bull’s favour. However, with many more opportunities to overtake at the Italian track compared with Zandvoort, the benefit to Red Bull might not be as significant as expected.
“The most important thing is that Max is okay,” Mekies said of Verstappen’s lap one incident.
“It was a pretty big shunt, and we are all glad to see that he’s out of the car, unharmed, and that’s what matters the most.”
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