Red Bull Team Principal Laurent Mekies was pleased with the progress that has been made with the RB22 since Suzuka, calling their performance in Miami “a definite step forward”, but he conceded the pace was not there to fight for victory.
Max Verstappen delivered his best Qualifying performance of the year to grab a spot on the front row for the Sunday’s Grand Prix, and came close to leading the race shortly after the start.
But the Dutchman then made an error of his own as he span on Lap 1, dropping him down the order and leaving him with a recovery mission ahead.
He wound up on an alternate strategy to his rivals after taking an early pit stop behind the Safety Car, and managed to make his tyres last 51 laps as he came home fifth.
“There is a definitive step forward,” explained Mekies following the race. “We left Japan 1.2 seconds away from pole, China 1.0 seconds away from pole.
“Competition was not going to wait for us with their updates. Everybody has updated the car, but certainly we knew that on top of the development race, we had to solve some of our issues and we knew there was lap time in it.
“So, to see us this weekend qualifying six tenths away from pole on Friday and less than two tenths away from pole on Saturday is a big indication of the size of the progress.”
Red Bull won’t be able to easily work out the exact deficit to their rivals, given Verstappen ran a different strategy while Isack Hadjar was only out there for a handful of laps, the youngster crashing out after breaking his front suspension.
But considering Red Bull were fighting with Alpine in the midfield last time out, they have made definite progress back up towards the front.
“I think overall, big picture, [the] race pace was strong, confirming the good signs shown in Quali,” added Mekies. “[It was] not strong enough for P1 and P2, but perhaps able to put us in a fight between P3, P4 and P5.
“So, again, something that we had not shown so far this season and it’s credit to everyone back at Milton Keynes for such an important step forward. Don’t get me wrong, we have not cracked everything we wanted to, so us against us, there is more we want to extract out of our package, and then we are conscious that development race will be on and competition will bring stuff [to the] next race.”
While Verstappen did well to recover from that early spin, Hadjar had a tougher afternoon and his frustration was clear to see, the Frenchman banging the steering wheel and throwing his arms in the air after a small error in clipping the barriers sent him careering into the opposite wall.
Hadjar has not come as close to Verstappen this weekend as he managed in the first three rounds, often around a second off the Dutchman’s times. But Mekies is not concerned with the form of his other driver just yet.
“We had a tough weekend [with Hadjar]. To be honest, we know we haven’t done everything perfectly on our side without giving away too many secrets. You may find out for yourself that we have had a straight-line performance deficit on this car for most of the weekend. This has not helped the overall performance.
“I think in terms of driving and in terms of rhythms, [Hadjar] slowly got into the right rhythm. I think he would have been strong in the race and he was strong for the little he could have shown. Hence, I don’t think we are worried.
“We certainly didn’t have a clean weekend. We didn’t help him either by sending him from the back of the grid after our mistake with the legality of the car. So, no, not worried.”
Red Bull remain some way adrift of their rivals after only scoring with one car, sitting in fourth in the Championship on 30 points, while McLaren in third have 94 points despite recording three DNS results this season.
But Mekies believes that, as well as the upgrades, the team have understood more about how to get the best out of their package – thus giving the drivers more confidence to push, which should in turn lead to better results in the upcoming races.
“We knew we were losing a serious amount of lap time with that lack of confidence the drivers could have in the car,” he added.
“[Solving] that was most of the work that has been done in these five weeks’ break in addition to the normal development.”
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