A couple of weeks on from his first Grand Prix win as Red Bull’s team boss, Laurent Mekies celebrated another thanks to the “untouchable” Max Verstappen’s controlled drive to the top step of the podium in Azerbaijan.
After an eight-round run without a triumph – not including Verstappen’s Sprint success in Belgium – Red Bull returned to winning ways at the Italian Grand Prix with an emphatic display from the four-time World Champion.
Many in the paddock were curious to see if Red Bull could carry that form over to the streets of Baku and, on a particularly dramatic weekend, Verstappen stayed clear of trouble to make it back-to-back pole positions and race wins.
With McLaren experiencing a difficult event thanks to Oscar Piastri crashing out of Qualifying and the race and Lando Norris only finishing seventh, Verstappen has now closed to within 69 points of the championship lead.
Speaking on F1 TV’s post-race show, Mekies said of Verstappen’s performance: “That was really such an impressive demonstration he has done again, two weeks after Monza.
“Coming here, the super-difficult conditions in Qualifying, not knowing very much what to expect today in terms of race pace… Nobody had done any long runs on the medium or on the hard [tyres].
“He just took it step by step, he just pulled away tenth after tenth, and he seemed untouchable. Obviously it made everything quite a bit more easy.”
Mekies added that Verstappen’s brace of victories, mixed with Tsunoda’s solid P6 finish on Sunday, appear to show that the team have made some breakthroughs with their RB21 challenger – in what has been an up-and-down season so far.
“It’s also a very good sign for the car,” he commented, following on from recent updates and a shift in engineering approach. “Yuki was also fast, a few tenths away from Max, and bringing home some good points – his best race, I think, for us.
“We know this track is still very specific… it’s not Monza, but it’s still low-downforce, it’s still the very low-speed corners. But [it] confirms in these sort of situations we have unlocked something.
“We are equally conscious that we go into the rest of the season with very different tracks, but it will be a good test for all of us as a team.”
With that in mind, Mekies is keen to see what unfolds at the upcoming Singapore Grand Prix – a race Red Bull last won with Sergio Perez in 2022 and before that with Sebastian Vettel back in 2013.
“We take it step by step,” he said. “We concentrate on ourselves, we try to look at what is limiting us, how to unlock it… that’s what the guys have been so good to do both [at the factory] in Milton Keynes and here at the race track.
“It worked here, it worked at Monza. The equation in Singapore will be completely different. We know it’s back to the very, very high downforce, and tracks we have been struggling [at] a little bit more, higher temperatures. So, we’ll see.
“We focus on trying to improve step by step the car. Even if the regulations are completely different next year, developing our understanding of what is limiting us has value, and hence we are taking it as seriously as we can.”
While Verstappen has boosted his outside title chances, Red Bull remain in the hunt for second in the Teams’ Championship – their tally of 272 points comparing to Ferrari’s 286 and Mercedes’ 290.
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