Max Verstappen is not thinking about his F1 title prospects as yet after double win, as Laurent Mekies expands on team’s up trend in recent races.
After back-to-back wins in Monza and Baku, Red Bull’s Verstappen trimmed the lead to 69 points in F1 drivers’ title race against McLaren pair of Oscar Piastri and also Lando Norris. If not the ultimate thing, he is much closer to the Brit in the fight for second in the standings.
Piastri, Norris and Andrea Stella see Verstappen as one of the contenders or at least someone who can influence the outcome. The Dutchman is not thinking too much about it, so much so, that he is doing side racing in the NLS competition, where he took an outright win in GT3 driving a Ferrari machine.
“I mean, I don’t rely on hope,” said Verstappen, on his F1 title chances. “But it’s seven rounds left – 69 points is a lot. So I personally don’t think about it. I just go race by race, what I have been doing basically the whole season — just trying to do the best we can, try to score the most points that we can. And then after Abu Dhabi, we’ll know.”
Red Bull team boss Mekies has similar view to Verstappen. He knows the confidence his up considering how the car is performing, but he is not raising his hopes as high and taking it one race at a time. The team has sprint races to play around as well, but from the outside they are keeping low hopes.
On the side, there is some games being played like in Baku, they had Yuki Tsunoda fend off Lando Norris rather than the Japanese risking a move against Liam Lawson ahead. “I tell you how we look at it, we really take it race by race,” said Mekies to media. “So we don’t look at the championship positions. We don’t even look at it from a constructor perspective.
“Yes, it’s nice to look at the battle for second place on the constructors, but we take it step by step in terms of our understanding of the car, in terms of the lap time of the car. We got some good answers in Monza, of course. We got some good answers in Baku. We are equally conscious that they are two very, very specific tracks.
“So the way we look at next race is not by looking at the gap to whoever, but it’s okay. Singapore is going to be a different challenge. How we tackle it. How we learn applied to that. How much of that we think can be tested there and how much risk you want to take. At the moment, we try to have a high risk approach to try to learn as much as we can for the end of the season.
“That prevails on championship discussions or whatever. You’re right in saying that the confidence goes up. Also, you can take a bit more risk every race and experiment a bit more and unlock more lap time. Whether that has an effect on what McLaren does, honestly, I don’t know. Probably none of our business. We concentrate on ourselves. That’s what we want to see.
“We want to see the car making progress in some areas. If it works, it will be good against McLaren. It will be good against Mercedes and Ferrari,” summed up Mekies. Over the course of the season, Red Bull has had updates made to the car to fine-tune its balance. They brought an updated floor in Monza.
It delivered some results, which was confirmed in Baku. Also, the change in mindset with the arrival of Mekies has helped in better setup during race weekends. The Frenchman is not going too far ahead that the updates have changed the game, but he sees a positive step for the rest of the races.
The floor is not the only aspect of progress made. “You’re right, I think we probably feel in Baku that some of the good stuff we have seen in Monza, we found it again,” continued Mekies. “Certainly, in the slow-speed corners of Baku, there are only slow-speed corners here. It’s very low downforce, but only slow-speed corners. It worked very well for us, which is a different equation to Monza.
“That’s the good news. The common point is a very, very low downforce. You go to Singapore, you move a bit your equations, you keep the slow-speed corners, but you go to maximum downforce. We have been struggling quite a lot with Budapest and before Budapest. Also, a much hotter track, probably, compared to that. We know how sensitive not only us, but the whole field is to this aspect.
“We take it step by step. We take the challenge of Singapore. It’s a track that we’ve been challenging for the team many, many years. In the context of what we are trying to see, it’s very, very important to see what suddenly doesn’t work there anymore or whatever. Then, after trying to take it to the next step, you will be back to tracks with medium-speed corners where we were killed by McLaren two races ago in Zandvoort.
“The gap was very significant. Also, in Spa, we left Spa thinking that they were half a second faster than us, even though Max won the sprint. That’s the next set of answers we will be chasing there. I guess the short answer is that we do not think in the team that there is a silver bullet with a single aspect. We really do not think at all. We think there is a combination of a lot of small details that have extracted more performance out of the car.
“Of course, a part of that is the Monza floor. A part of that is some of the changes we have made. The extent of that competitiveness, again, on different circumstances, the honest answer is that we don’t know. We are hopeful, but we will soon find out,” summed up Mekies.
Here’s McLaren trio on Max Verstappen’s F1 title chances
Here’s Yuki Tsunoda and VCARB on future