The second Red Bull was outqualified by at least one Racing Bulls on nine occasions (sprint qualifying not included), with even Max Verstappen<\/a> 0.003s slower than Lawson in Austria.<\/p>\n Red Bull endured one of its worst weekends in recent times last weekend at the Hungarian Grand Prix. Verstappen qualified down in eighth, just ahead of the Racing Bulls, and struggled to ninth place behind Lawson on Sunday.<\/p>\n Following the qualifying session on Saturday, Sky Sports F1 asked Mekies if Red Bull could take things from the Racing Bulls car to find more performance with the RB21 \u2013 an idea he ruled out.<\/p>\n \u201cNo, I think the question is fair, but there’s a genesis of the car,\u201d the Frenchman explained. \u201cWhere the cars are coming from is too different for anyone to transfer anything from a car to another. It’s what Formula 1 is today.<\/p>\n \u201cYou know, it’s 10 independent teams all coming with their own ideas about where to develop the car, what difficulties they found along the way, which development paths they have ended up having due to that. And there is nothing you could take from a car to another. It’s really down to how it was developed from early on.\u201d<\/p>\n Laurent Mekies, Red Bull Racing Team Principal<\/p>\n Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool<\/p>\n Mekies said Verstappen\u2019s vast experience was \u201cessential\u201d in such tough times, with the four-time world champion having raced at Red Bull for the past nine years, making them the third-longest F1 partnership behind Lewis Hamilton<\/a> at Mercedes<\/a> and Michael Schumacher<\/a> at Ferrari<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt’s a huge advantage because he knows when the car has been working. He knows when the car has not been working,\u201d Mekies said.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd especially in a situation like that where it’s not so much a balance issue, it’s really like we are struggling to find the level of grip we should be having here. And he’s certainly been a huge, huge help in these situations.\u201d<\/p>\n Read Also:<\/p>\n Mekies also admitted to \u201cexperimenting\u201d unsuccessfully over the weekend at the Hungaroring, failing to find a solution to the RB21\u2019s lack of grip.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I can tell you is that it was there from the first lap in FP1,\u201d he said in his post-race media session. \u201cWe look at each other and we say, what’s going on?<\/p>\n \u201cWe could see in all the slow-speed, medium-speed [corners], we are just very slow. It was something, we couldn’t say that it was balance-related.<\/p>\n Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing, Yuki Tsunoda, Red Bull Racing<\/p>\n Photo by: Guido De Bortoli \/ LAT Images via Getty Images<\/p>\n \u201cWe felt that we couldn’t put the car in the right window, we couldn’t switch on the tyres. Sometimes it happens in FP1, but not in that magnitude. It felt wrong from the beginning and we tried very many things.<\/p>\n \u201cThe good thing is that the guys really went out and tried with both cars different things. It didn’t do any difference, we couldn’t switch on the tyres. Long run, short run, sometimes it makes you get \u2013 by luck or by merit \u2013 in the right window, but it never quite happened. And it was like that in qualifying.<\/p>\n \u201cOf course, you can always look at your best sample and think that this was actually alright. But the truth is, on average, it never quite came back. I think it’s been a theme this year to say that the window is narrow \u2013 and sometimes very narrow. I think today was a lot more than that. Today we were really unable to get the car to run.\u201d<\/p>\n Additional reporting by Ronald Vording<\/p>\n In this article<\/p>\n Be the first to know and subscribe for real-time news email updates on these topics<\/p>\n Subscribe to news alerts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Red Bull team boss Laurent Mekies has stated his Formula 1 team\u2019s struggles couldn\u2019t be fixed simply by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":322248,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4103],"tags":[4199,707,4200,81867,81868,4856,749,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-322247","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-f1","8":"tag-f1","9":"tag-formula-1","10":"tag-formula1","11":"tag-hungarian-gp","12":"tag-hungaroring","13":"tag-rb","14":"tag-red-bull-racing","15":"tag-sports","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114981336995695777","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322247\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/322248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Laurent](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/1753697294_667_laurent-mekies-red-bull-racing.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Max](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/1754334556_899_max-verstappen-red-bull-racing.jpg\")
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