Newey: Red Bull winning form unrelated to return to duty

Red Bull design guru Adrian Newey says his team's upswing in form in the last two races is likely unrelated to his return to the bulls' garage after a period of absence.

Newey was sidelined for several weeks last summer and constrained to his home after suffering injuries in a nasty cycling crash last summer in Croatia.

Coincidently, Red Bull's form relative to arch-rival Mercedes slightly slumped during the engineer's absence, with the German outfit prevailing in Russia and in Turkey where Newey returned to active duty.

But Red Bull was firing on all cylinders once again in Austin and last weekend in Mexico City. However, a flattered Newey played down the suggestion that his reappearance had boosted the Milton Keynes-based team's performance.

"That's very kind, but maybe it's coincidence. I enjoy being here!" Newey told the F1 Nation podcast.

"I'm enjoying being back, missed it. Hopefully, I bring something, but it's a great team. So I just try and fill in the cracks if I see them."

Although Max Verstappen took two clear cut wins in Austin and in Mexico City, Newey dealt with a healthy workload at both races.

"There's so many little bits at the track, the decisions on the details of the setup, how we use the tyres," he added.

"In Austin, we had some reliability concerns over the front wing grounding, here [in Mexico City] we had a drama with the rear wing going into qualifying post-FP3.

"Racecars aren't 100 percent reliable, they keep throwing things at you."

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Newey shed some light on the load issues that impacted - for different reasons - the rear wing of Red Bull's RB16B at the Circuit of the Americas and last weekend in Mexico.

"We had a problem in Texas, which was completely unrelated to the problem we had here," he explained.

"It was the same wing we would normally run in Monaco and Hungary, but because of the low air density, everybody runs maximum downforce here.

"The fact that you get to terminal velocity means it's actually carrying more load than it would do in Hungary, and that seemed to be what was catching us out.

"Trying to understand that and [make] hasty modifications between FP3 and qualifying, happily, seemed to do the trick."

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