Red Bull was able to prove it has unlocked performance in its car across different circuit types with its pace in the Singapore Grand Prix, according to team principal Laurent Mekies.
Max Verstappen was in the fight for pole position and started on the front row in Singapore, staying close to race-winner George Russell while also keeping Lando Norris at bay. In beating both McLarens at a high downforce circuit, Mekies says Red Bull has proven its wins in the previous two races – at low downforce venues – were not solely due to track characteristics.
“For sure for us, being able to fight for the win here, it means a lot,” Mekies said. “After Monza, Baku, it was very different. You never know until you are coming to the high downforce tracks.
“So we’ve been able to be in the right rhythms from Friday. We were in the right rhythm in qualifying – it was very, very close to pole – and we were in the right rhythm in the race. If you look, we finished a few seconds away from George.
“So this is good news. It means that what we have unlocked is not only low downforce specific. We will not change our approach. We’ll continue to take it race by race. We’ll continue to take the learnings.
“There is most probably quite a few learnings we can make from this race, on some more small pockets of performance that we may be able to unlock in the future.
“I think Austin will be a very different equation again. It’s back to the famous mid-speed corners, where McLaren was also very strong here, Turn 5, Turn 9, they have been very, very strong all weekend against us, and you have a lot of them in Austin and in Mexico. So, we take it race by race, and then we’ll see.”
Despite the strong result, Verstappen was not completely happy with the handling of his car throughout the race in Singapore, having gone for an aggressive strategy that left him defending from Norris for the second half of the grand prix.
“In terms of single issues for the race, I’m not able to tell you,” he said. “It was very tough out there. We started with a soft tire, we were one of the only cars in the top 10… and we did that to try to obviously maximize our chance to get George at the start, but it didn’t happen. And I think that very quickly has exposed us to have more degradation, to have basically a more difficult car to deal with.
“As a result of that, we pitted earlier, pushed very hard on the hard tires, managed to close the gap. But what it meant is that most of the race, Max had been defending with older tires than his instant competition. So it’s a choice of aggressiveness that we felt was necessary if we wanted to have a shot at the win.
“So the good news is that he did a great job at managing to bring the car back in second despite the pressure from Lando. Now, I think, nonetheless, underneath that there is probably a few things that we need to work on, things that were disturbing him during the race, but I would probably qualify them as something of a lower magnitude.”
