Max Verstappen’s podium in Mexico highlights Red Bull car issues, Mekies insists title is secondary. Red Bull is focusing on maximizing Max Verstappen’s car performance.

According to team principal Laurent Mekies, Red Bull’s focus remains solely on extracting the maximum from the car, with any potential championship victory expected to come as a natural consequence.

Red Bull: glass half full or half empty?

After the Mexican Grand Prix, the picture for Red Bull could be seen as either positive or concerning. Max Verstappen ultimately maximized his result by climbing to third place – second place would have been theoretically possible without the final Virtual Safety Car, but the Dutch driver would have needed to take a risk overtaking Charles Leclerc. Looking at the bigger picture, McLaren outperformed all rivals in terms of pace. While Oscar Piastri endured another difficult weekend, Lando Norris was on a completely different level, finishing more than 30 seconds ahead of all challengers.

Laurent Mekies speaks

In summary, Max Verstappen achieved more than expected after a difficult Friday, disappointing qualifying, and early-race skirmishes with Lewis Hamilton, but he still lost 10 points to the new championship leader. Perhaps this is why Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies does not completely dismiss the title fight, but he seems intent on lowering expectations. Mekies told RacingNews365 that the team’s approach has not changed: “We won’t change our approach, and if we weren’t thinking about the World Championship five races ago, and we weren’t thinking about it before Austin, we’re not thinking about it after Austin either.”

He added: “Right now, what we’re focused on is that, yes, we don’t feel we performed at 100% this weekend in terms of car performance, so we want to concentrate on that. The focus must be on what we would do differently if we could repeat the Mexico City weekend and what we can learn for Brazil. The possibility of winning the title will be nothing more than a consequence of this type of work. Being close or far in terms of points doesn’t change anything for us as a team. What we need to do is extract all the potential from the car and be sure we’ve gotten the maximum out of it, and that this maximum is enough to fight for F1 Grand Prix wins. In Mexico, it wasn’t, and Red Bull needs to focus on this for the upcoming races.” – the French manager concluded.