Red Bull Team Principal and CEO Laurent Mekies has contradicted Max Verstappen‘s assessment of a potential engine penalty after the Formula 1 Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
Verstappen came into qualifying on Friday at the Baku City Street Circuit as one of the top contenders to secure pole position for the race on Saturday.
But engine gremlins in Q3 meant he could only post the eighth-fastest lap of the top 10 shootout.
Red Bull isolated the issues on his PU and swapped it for an entirely new configuration, albeit with components from within the allocated pool, meaning he did not incur a grid drop.
After the race, however, the Dutchman was confident that he would now have to take an engine penalty in one of the remaining rounds on the calendar.
That said, Mekies is of a wholly different opinion. The Frenchman is hopeful that the Milton-Keynes-based outfit can salvage Verstappen’s Baku qualifying engine.
“It is not clear yet,” the Frenchman told media after the race.
“It will very much depend on our analysis of the issues we had with his engine [in qualifying], which we had to take off the car, and whether or not we can use that engine again.
“Based on that, we will see if we can make it to the end with his fourth engine [from the pool].”
Mekies praises “very strong” Max Verstappen for rectifying Baku qualifying mishap
Despite starting from the fourth-row of the grid, the four-time F1 World Champion drove a stellar 51-lap race at Baku.
Verstappen brought himself into podium contention pretty early on in the race, and had his eyes on his maiden 2026 win in the late phases of the Grand Prix.
The Red Bull driver was pinned to the gearbox of George Russell for the final third of the race, and eventually missed out on the win by just a tenth of a second at the chequered flag.
Mekies lauded Verstappen, insisting that he would have been in the conversation for pole if not for “two different” issues on his PU impeding his progress.
“We had two different issues with the power unit, and it cost us a lot, but that’s what it is. That’s part of the game,” he explained.
“In fairness, Max was very, very strong from Friday onwards, and probably would have been fighting for that first row without the issues we had with the PU.
“Of course, fixing that with the new engine allowed us to get back to the competitive level that we were hoping to have.”
F1 returns to the Sepang International Circuit for the first time since 2017 this weekend for the Bahrain GP in Malaysia. This should come as a good omen for the Dutchman who won the race last time out.
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