"Kimi Was Faster": Red Bull's Mekies Rules Out Excuses After Austin Defeat

Laurent Mekies has wanted to be honest after the United States Grand Prix, the Red Bull director, far from looking for excuses for Max Verstappen's third place in Austin has acknowledged that Kimi Antonelli and Mercedes were simply faster, an admission of superiority that reflects the maturity of a team that despite having won the two previous races, knows how to recognize when its rival has been above.

"I think Kimi had more pace than us today, I don't think we can use any excuse about tires or strategy, I think Kimi was faster than us today. Fair play and well done to him" Mekies declared after the race. The Frenchman explained that the differences between Mercedes' one-stop strategy and Red Bull's two-stop strategy were minimal in terms of race time: "It is probably fair to say that the one-stop and the two-stop seem very close in terms of race times, we split our cars as you saw, I think Ferrari was going to two stops and I think McLaren was going to one stop, so I think in race time, they were probably very, very close" he added.

The Red Bull director also pointed out that the Austrian team could not take advantage of its usual advantage with the soft tires: "It is probably fair to say that we normally enjoy a small advantage compared to the competition with the softer compounds and today we struggled to use that advantage. We suffered quite high degradation with Max on the two sets of softs we had and that certainly did not help to materialize the second stop" Mekies explained. Tire degradation was a determining factor in Verstappen's performance who could not follow Antonelli's pace in the last laps.

Despite the defeat, Mekies found reasons for optimism in the debut of Tom Hart as Verstappen's race engineer replacing Gianpiero Lambiase who will leave for McLaren: "I think he did an excellent job and you see me smiling because I certainly remember what it is like to be in your first race as a race engineer and he chose a fairly complicated race to do it but that was not his choice. Jokes aside, I think he really did an excellent job, first qualifying, first race he has managed to channel the work of the engineering teams behind him to Max very well and of course the race was complicated and we are probably a little frustrated with P3, which is the good news but I really think he did an excellent job and was very well supported by GP also in the background" he stated.

Mekies also identified the starts as an area for improvement for Red Bull: "As much as we have reduced the gap with the competition and you may remember how bad our starts were at the beginning of the year, we are still not the reference and yes, the fact that the car has improved a lot and is fighting closer to the front makes that deficit even more painful now because the competition around us is very strong, on the one hand, I am sure that we will continue reducing the gap with the competition from now until the end of the year, on the other hand I know equally that we will not be the reference before the end of the season which will require some significant design and hardware changes, and that that is something we will only see next year" he concluded.

Red Bull faces the last races with its sights set on 2027, aware that there is still work to do to catch Mercedes.