After a bruising Hungarian Grand Prix weekend that exposed more of Red Bull Racing’s growing weaknesses, team principal Laurent Mekies has clarified that there is no magic solution to be found in the team’s sister outfit, Racing Bulls.
Despite Liam Lawson’s impressive eighth-place finish for the satellite squad, Mekies made it clear: the Red Bull RB21 and Racing Bulls’ VCARB 02 are simply too different for any immediate technical crossover.
Max Verstappen could only manage a lowly ninth in Budapest, while Lawson brought home valuable points in a car that looked far more compliant across the Hungaroring’s twisty layout.
Nothing to Take from one Car to the Other
With such stark contrast in fortunes, speculation immediately grew around whether Red Bull might look to emulate elements from Racing Bulls' more stable package. Mekies, however, has firmly ruled that out.
“No, I think the question is fair, but there’s a genesis of the car,” Mekies told reporters in Hungary when asked about the possibility of learning from the sister team’s design.
“Where 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.
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“You 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.”
Mekies acknowledged the contrast between the performance of the two teams’ designs, but insisted the RB21’s concept is on its own trajectory and must be solved internally.
The Hungaroring Puzzle
Red Bull’s struggle in Hungary was apparent from the very first session, according to Mekies, who recounted the bafflement the team faced from FP1 onward.
“What I can tell you is that it was there from the first lap in FP1. We look at each other and we say, what’s going on?” he recalled.
“We 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.”
“We 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.”
The team attempted multiple setup variations across both Verstappen’s and Yuki Tsunoda’s cars, but nothing worked.
“The good thing is that the guys really went out and tried with both cars different things,” Mekies said. “It didn’t do any difference, we couldn’t switch on the tyres.”
“Long run, short run, sometimes it makes you get – by luck or by merit – in the right window, but it never quite happened. And it was like that in qualifying.
“Of 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.”
A Narrow Setup Window
Red Bull has previously admitted that the RB21 operates within an extremely narrow setup window – but according to Mekies, Hungary was a worst-case scenario.
“I think it’s been a theme this year to say that the window is narrow – and sometimes very narrow,” he said. “I think today was a lot more than that.
“Today we were really unable to get the car to run.”
Even Verstappen, with his deep knowledge of the car’s characteristics, could do little to pull performance out of a fundamentally uncooperative machine.
“It’s a huge advantage because he knows when the car has been working. He knows when the car has not been working,” Mekies said of Verstappen.
“And 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.”
With the team falling from its once-dominant perch, Red Bull is left staring down a development dead end, where no easy solutions or sibling synergies exist.
The RB21 is its own beast, and right now, not even Verstappen’s brilliance can consistently tame it.
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