Laurent Mekies has just finished his debut season as Red Bull Racing team principal, coming within a heartbreaking two points of stealing the constructors’ championship in Abu Dhabi. In any other year that would feel like a disaster, but the Frenchman insists the decision to keep pushing the RB21 right until the chequered flag in 2025 was one of the best calls the team ever made.
Back in early September, Max Verstappen sat more than 100 points away from the drivers’ title lead and the RB21 looked like a tricky, inconsistent beast. Most teams in that position would have quietly parked development and switched every resource to the all-new 2026 car. Red Bull did the opposite – they doubled down.
To outsiders it looked like stubborn pride or a refusal to accept reality. Inside Milton Keynes, however, Laurent Mekies and his staff saw a golden opportunity to fix fundamental problems that would otherwise carry straight over into the biggest regulation change in a generation.
Speaking exclusively to Motorsport.com, the former Ferrari and FIA man explained the philosophy that guided Red Bull through the final months of 2025.
“We didn’t want to live in an illusion”
“It seemed pretty obvious to us that we didn’t want to just turn the page and hope that, even though the 2025 car hadn’t been good enough to fight for the championship, the 2026 one magically would be,” Laurent Mekies said.
“So we didn’t want to take that route. We wanted to go to the bottom of that project, understand why it wasn’t working, because fundamentally next year we will use the same tools, the same processes, the same methodologies. Yes, maybe we lost a bit of time doing it, but we didn’t want to follow the path of illusions.”
“Was it difficult? No. It was something we were extremely convinced about from the very beginning.”
The payoff was almost perfect: Red Bull turned a mid-season crisis into a genuine title fight, scored multiple victories in the closing races and gathered priceless data about correlation issues, tyre behaviour and aerodynamic weaknesses that had plagued the RB21 all year.
Max Verstappen: The most expensive (and best) sensor in F1
Mekies saved his warmest words for the driver who made it all possible.
“Max is our most expensive sensor, but he’s the best one,” he said with a smile. “There is no simulator, no wind-tunnel model, no CFD run that gives you the feedback Max can give you in a single lap. When you have a driver who can extract every thousandth from a difficult car and then explain exactly why it’s difficult, you learn more in one weekend than most teams learn in a month.”
That unique Verstappen factor is exactly why Red Bull refused to give up on 2025. Every mile Max completed, every brutally honest debrief, fed directly into the processes that will shape the 2026 challenger – a car that has to be lighter, more electrically dependent and built around active aero.
Two points may have separated Red Bull from championship glory this year, but Laurent Mekies heads into the winter convinced the team is now perfectly positioned to dominate when the new era begins.
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