Verstappen praises Mekies’ tweaks after surprise Red Bull win
Max Verstappen and Helmut Marko have credited Red Bull’s surprisingly dominant Italian Grand Prix victory to a change in approach to setting up the car under new boss Laurent Mekies.
Verstappen took pole position and then won Monza at a canter, beating the usually untouchable McLarens by nearly 20 seconds — the biggest winning margin any driver has had this season.
It was the first Red Bull grand prix win not to come under the leadership of Christian Horner, who was replaced as team principal by former engineer Mekies in late July.
The result, and Verstappen’s podium at the Dutch Grand Prix seven days earlier, represented a major shift in form from prior to the summer break.
Verstappen has been vocal over the past 18 months about Red Bull’s volatile car, which was previously a world-beater in 2022 and 2023, the four-time world champion said the team is approaching each weekend with a clearer focus in terms of how to extract the maximum out of it.
“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,” Verstappen said on Sunday. “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, that at one point some things give you a bit of an idea of a direction, and that’s what we kept on working on.
“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.”
Formula 1 cars rarely change fundamentally overnight — lead times are significant and upgrades are always in the pipeline for a while, so any new parts coming to the Red Bull car now would have been part of a process initiated under Horner’s overall watch.
Long-time Red Bull advisor Marko acknowledged that the team has not made any major changes to its upgrade plan or to the fundamentals of the car.
However, he reiterated what Verstappen had said — the team is extracting performance from the car in a better way.
“The difference is that the preparation of a weekend is a different one now,” Marko said, as per Motorsport.com.
“Laurent is an excellent engineer, so now the idea is more to take whatever the simulation shows us, but mix that with the experience that Max has and with the experience that our racing engineers have. That’s how we want to make a car that is more predictable and drivable.
“This is the product of that. Basically, it’s the same product as we had before, just some upgrades were coming and they are working. But 20 seconds on McLaren, I wouldn’t have predicted that.”
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Verstappen’s win was his third of the season and his first since the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix in May.
While seen as a title outsider earlier in the year he has now slipped well out of the title picture.
He is third, 96 points behind championship leader Oscar Piastri.