Verstappen has closed his championship deficit to leader Oscar Piastri from almost 100 points down to 63 points after four strong race results in a row, including beating both McLarens in Singapore, a traditionally difficult venue for Red Bull in recent years.
Verstappen has closed his championship deficit to leader Oscar Piastri from almost 100 points down to 63 points after four strong race results in a row, including beating both McLarens in Singapore, a traditionally difficult venue for Red Bull in recent years.
“Max is a driver who is just Max Verstappen. I don’t think we need to make any further comments, so it’s no surprise that they are in the game.
“It’s tight, and it’s interesting; obviously, we would like to make Formula 1 boring. We have done it sometimes, at some of the events, but normally, Formula 1 is competitive and tight.
“You have to accept the fight, and that’s what we are doing.”
In order to aid its competitiveness at Marina Bay, a circuit at which Red Bull has struggled in recent years, the Milton Keynes-based squad brought along two small revisions to the RB21 in Singapore, minor updates that nonetheless appeared to play a part in the team’s improved competitiveness at its bogey circuit.
Team boss Laurent Mekies said after Verstappen’s competitive second-place finish that it appears the steps forward made with the car in recent races appears genuine, and that Singapore had apparently confirmed the team has unlocked performance across the downforce spectrum.
“For us, being able to fight for the win means a lot after Monza and Baku, which are very different. You never know until you come to a high-downforce track,” he told the media in Singapore.
“We’ve been able to be in the right rhythm from Friday; we were in the right rhythm in qualifying, and we were very, very close to pole.
“And we were in the right rhythm in the race. We finished only 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 are probably quite a few learnings we can make from this race on some small pockets of performance that we may be able to unlock for the future.
“Austin will be a very different equation. Again, it’s back to the famous mid-speed corners, where McLaren has been very strong.
“Here [in Singapore], 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.”
Red Bull’s step forward in performance has come in the wake of the parent company opting for a change in leadership, as former team principal and CEO Christian Horner was removed after Silverstone, replaced by Mekies in both roles.
The upgrades introduced to the car since are a hangover from Horner’s time in charge, due to lead time in development and production, but Mekies has been singled out for praise by Red Bull’s Helmut Marko, who says that the French engineer’s engineering nous has contributed to a change in approach and the resulting step forward in performance.
Long-time Red Bull chief engineer Paul Monaghan weighed in on how he feels processes have evolved since the change in team boss, saying that, in his eyes, not much in terms of engineering has changed.
“In terms of the actual sort of engineering process around the car, no, not really,” he said.
“Laurent is pretty open. You can talk to him, and we surely do.
“He’s open to ideas. He will let us do what we think is right, so, in that respect, not really.
“For me, not much has changed in that.”
