The team principal of the Anglo-Austrian outfit, Laurent Mekies, has expressed serious doubts about Red Bull’s performance heading into the upcoming Las Vegas Grand Prix.
The Formula 1 World Championship has reached a turning point: Lando Norris leads the drivers’ standings with a 49-point advantage over Red Bull driver Max Verstappen, with only three Grands Prix and one sprint race left — Las Vegas, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi — for a maximum of 83 points still available. Since the summer break, the driver from Hasselt has won in Italy, Azerbaijan, and Austin, and has finished on the podium at every race afterward, steadily cutting into a gap that at one point had grown to over 100 points.
However, the consistency of Lando Norris and the McLaren team has made the comeback extremely complicated. Red Bull knows that to keep alive the dream of Max Verstappen securing a fifth consecutive world title, they will likely need at least two victories and a very solid result in the remaining three rounds, with no margin for mistakes.
The statements of Laurent Mekies
The team principal and CEO of Red Bull, Laurent Mekies, has been particularly clear when describing how difficult it has been to understand the RB21 throughout the season. Speaking to the media ahead of the Las Vegas weekend, he said: “You know, we have regularly been wrong in predicting which tracks the car would adapt well to and which it wouldn’t. There have been circuits where we thought we would be very fast and then we got there and it was difficult; others where we thought we would struggle and instead we were surprisingly competitive. Monza, Baku, Singapore are clear examples.”
He then continued on the subject of comparing with rivals: “Directly comparing ourselves with other teams is probably a bit too difficult at the moment, because every team is following different development paths and the correlations between simulator and track are different for each one. We prefer to focus on ourselves, to understand where we can improve our package and execution.”
Regarding a circuit like Las Vegas, characterized by extremely long straights and low downforce, Laurent Mekies dismissed the idea that the problem is simply running a “low-downforce” setup: “I wouldn’t blame the track itself, nor the fact that we run with little wing. The point is that finding the perfect operating window for the car is an extremely complex process. I think this is a simple truth, but it’s easy to forget: it’s difficult to do, even when you win. It’s simply very hard at every single race. Even in weekends where we dominated, behind the scenes there were a thousand details to sort out. There is no easy weekend in today’s F1.”
The realistic perspective of Max Verstappen
Max Verstappen did not mince words in describing the uncertainty surrounding this end-of-season stretch: “Completely different tracks: Las Vegas, Qatar, Abu Dhabi. These are three layouts that couldn’t be more different. So it’s hard to know, honestly. We don’t know exactly where we will be strong and where we will struggle more.”
On tyres, a recurring weak point for the Red Bull RB21, Max Verstappen added: “Tyre management depends a lot on the type of corners, the track temperatures, and the air temperature. On some circuits, we can make them work straight away; on others, it takes half a race or even more. We always try to get into the right window starting Friday, but consistency is still an issue. We are not yet at the point where we can say ‘ok, wherever we go, the car works immediately.’”
Offering a very realistic assessment of the season, he said: “We’ve had many weekends where we were simply not fast enough. There isn’t much else to say: we weren’t fast enough and that creates a big gap. Then there were good moments: Monza, Baku, Austin, where we recovered points, but never enough to really reverse the situation. That’s how the season has gone: highs and lows, and in the end the highs weren’t enough to compensate for the lows.”
Why Las Vegas is the make-or-break weekend for Red Bull
Max Verstappen already won the inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix in 2023, dominating from pole position and managing a very long race with extremely low temperatures perfectly. On paper, the circuit should reward aerodynamic efficiency and engine power — two long-standing strengths of the Anglo-Austrian car — but the experience of the past year and a half has taught the team that “on paper” counts for less and less.
Both Laurent Mekies and Max Verstappen have sent the same message: maximum focus on themselves, no illusions, full awareness that every point will have to be earned and that a single off-weekend could be enough to see the dream of a fifth consecutive drivers’ title disappear completely. The frankness of their words is perhaps the clearest indication of how the RB21 is approaching these last three races with everything on the line, knowing that the margin for error is now practically zero.
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