Autobayng News Team
Max Verstappen said Red Bull’s new team principal Laurent Mekies played a significant role in helping them make the improvements which led to his emphatic victory at Monza yesterday.
He scored his third victory of the season in dominant fashion, taking the chequered flag 19 seconds ahead of Lando Norris.
Red Bull dominated the early years of Formula 1’s current technical regulations but hit a slump in performance in the middle of last year. A year later the upper management brought in Mekies to replace Christian Horner as team principal.
Verstappen said Mekies has imposed more order on their approach to fine-tuning the problematic RB21, which has paid off in the last two races.
“Up until now we’ve had a lot of races where we were just shooting left and right a little bit with the set-up of the car,” he said. “Quite extreme changes, which shows that we were not in control. We were not fully understanding what to do.
“With Laurent having an engineering background, he’s asking the right questions to the engineers – common-sense questions – so I think that works really well. Plus, you try to understand from the things that you have tried, then at one point something gives you a bit of an idea of a direction, and that’s what we kept on working on.”
He said the improvement was clear from Mekies’ third race in charge, the Dutch Grand Prix. “I definitely felt that in Zandvoort already we took a step that seemed to work quite well, and then here another step which felt again a little bit better.”
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Verstappen said he felt more in control of his car during this weekend’s race. “Before, it felt like you were a passenger in the car,” he said. “We had some races where it was just not balanced. Now, finally, there was more balance in the car and then the tyres also behaved a little bit more normally.”
Aside from the end of Verstappen’s first stint, when Norris was able to reduce his lead, the Red Bull driver said his pace was “probably a bit better than expected.”
“Once I got back in the lead I just tried to focus on my own pace and it kept on going well. I would say only the last maybe six to eight laps of that stint I started to struggle a little bit on the medium [tyre].
“Up until that point, it was nice for once. The car was doing a little bit more what I liked.
“It seems like this weekend has been another step forward with the behaviour of the car and that also then shows in the race. So that was a big positive for us.”
However he isn’t convinced the gains Red Bull made at Monza will translate to all the remaining circuits. “I think it’s still a bit track dependent,” said Verstappen. “Here you drive with low downforce. It always seems like our car is a little bit more competitive when it’s low-to-medium downforce.
“So it’s not like suddenly now we are back. It’s not like we can fight, I think, every single weekend. But the positive is that we seem to understand a little bit more what we need to do with the car to be more competitive.
“So I hope that that carries on into the coming rounds as well, and some tracks will be a bit better than others.”
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