Mekies willing to play the long game with VCARB

Visa Cash App RB team principal Laurent Mekies says a slow start to the season could be on the cards as the team looks to put strong foundations in place for the future.

The former AlphaTauri team – now known as VCARB – showed a clear step forward late in 2023 with upgrades that helped it surge from bottom of the constructors’ championship to finish eighth and threaten for seventh. Despite that momentum, Mekies says the rebranded team has a lot of departments it needs to develop and is not afraid of starting the season towards the back of the field once again.

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“My job so far has been about understanding the team, it’s about understanding the people, and it’s about understanding where our strengths and weaknesses are,” Mekies told RACER. “It’s very much the activity of this first weeks, and then once you do that you then start together to reinforce the team in all the areas where you feel a step is needed.”

“The truth is we want to see improvements in every single area, and we think this is how we will achieve a real step in competitiveness. So it’s not the shortest route but we feel it is a route that will take us consistently to the sharp end of the midfield, where we want to compete.

“We have the approach to build these foundations - it may take us a bit of time and it may mean that the first part of the season is a bit more difficult, but we feel it is the right approach if we want to be serious about our mid-term targets.”

Mekies himself brings with him recent experience from a front-running team in the form of Ferrari, but says he has been eager to get started at VCARB given the potential the refreshed team has.

“It has been a long wait, with the gardening leave. And then it’s been some incredible weeks starting with the team here. It’s about the birth of a new team - that’s how we look at it. It’s very concrete, and of course it’s a very special new team because it’s one that’s going to be built on an incredible basis and an incredible history that we proud of. But equally we look at it with the freshness of a brand new team.”