Verstappen’s team principal Laurent Mekies: “Everything will be different in Mexico”

Max Verstappen almost won the Baku Street Grand Prix in Azerbaijan, then he went on a winning streak: victory from pole at the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia, victory from pole in the Singapore Sprint, victory from pole in the Singapore Grand Prix.

Things didn’t go quite so well in Austin. Here in Mexico, Max Verstappen looked back on the race in Texas: “We’ve got a few areas to work on. For instance, the radio hasn’t worked properly a few times this year. We’ve looked into that. And our starts need to be more consistent – consistently good, that is. We didn’t use the right race strategy in Austin either. And when all that comes together, it’s just difficult to win a race.”

“Against that backdrop, it was quite astonishing that we still managed to get onto the podium. Normally we’re very good at executing a Grand Prix, but Texas was simply a weekend where things didn’t go so well. That can happen.”

Laurent Mekies, the 49-year-old Red Bull Racing team principal from Tours (north-west France), said in the paddock at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez: “So far, everything’s going as normal here. Ayumu Iwasa has done an excellent job standing in for Verstappen and has helped us to assess our new parts.”

“We had a minor engine issue with Isack Hadjar’s car, but that had nothing to do with the extreme altitude here.”

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“I think Mexico is an outlier in the pecking order precisely because of this altitude. I can’t say yet exactly where we stand there.”

“What I can confirm, however, is that we put in a lacklustre performance in Texas. Some of our problems in Austin were to be expected, others were not. Ultimately, Kimi Antonelli in the Mercedes was simply too strong anyway, but we certainly didn’t perform at the same high level as we did previously in Malaysia and Singapore. That needs to be better here in Mexico.”