Red Bull confident it can resolve early season car issues

Red Bull is well-placed to solve the issues that it is currently facing with its car that leaves it a distant fourth in the pecking order, according to team principal Laurent Mekies.

Pre-season testing suggested Red Bull had a level of performance that could trouble the top-three teams, but in Australia it was only able to compete with McLaren, as Mercedes and Ferrari pulled clear in the race. China was even worse for Red Bull, but Mekies says the Japanese Grand Prix showed a similar deficit to the start of the season and that the team is geared up to close that gap.

“We left Melbourne thinking that we were one second off Mercedes and half a second off Ferrari,” Mekies said. “The biggest difference in Melbourne was that McLaren looked in reach there. And actually, Max [Verstappen] came back from P20 to bumping to what was the first McLaren, with [Lando] Norris.

“Then we see that gap largely increasing in China, and you have seen us starting to scratch heads there about car balance and car characteristics. And then [at Suzuka] it also didn't look good at all on Friday, Saturday.

“Certainly, there is nothing to be happy about [the race in Japan], but in terms of overall gap to the competitors, it looked not too dissimilar to the Melbourne picture in terms of one second to the best car, half a second to the best Ferrari, but now, McLaren is at that same level. So, we are a distant fourth. That's the reality.

“I think it's a combination of underlying performance – Melbourne or [Suzuka] – so, some more work we need to do, and a layer of us not being able to extract enough from the package and to give something Max and Isack [Hadjar] can push with. And I'm not suggesting that it's setup tuning, I'm just saying there is something we are wrestling with, with that car that adds to our underlying lack of performance.

“Now, trying to solve this sort of complex issues and trying to understand complex limitations is our core business. So, as much as it feels bad when you are at the back of the top teams like now, that's precisely what the whole compass is set up to do: to get to the bottom of complex limitations like that and nail them, bring development that can mitigate them and improve. It feels bad now, but I have full confidence that that's exactly what our team is very good at.”

Reflecting on the opening three rounds, Mekies sees the Chinese Grand Prix performance as an outlier for Red Bull but one that highlights a weakness in what the team expects the car should be able to do.

“We certainly think that in China we made a step back," he said. "And we measure that not only against the top guys but also against the midfield that got closer to us. So I don't think it's a product of the number of corners only. I think there is a layer where in certain cornering speed and cornering conditions we lose some performance compared to what our package is supposed to give us. This we need to work on.

“It was a touch better [in Japan] compared to China, especially in the race. We didn't see it because we were, again, a distant fourth and it doesn't interest anyone to be a distant fourth. But I think the overall gap is what we have been talking about. It's about a second to the best guys and half a second to the best Ferraris, probably, where we are.”