Red Bull insiders say vital department has ‘completely lost its way’ despite Laurent Mekies’ arrival

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Laurent Mekies has received overwhelmingly positive feedback since he replaced Christian Horner at Red Bull. Results on track have been mixed, but his influence is limited for the moment.

Max Verstappen handed Mekies a perfect start by winning the Belgium Sprint, and he scored the team’s best Grand Prix result of the new era when he finished second at Zandvoort last weekend. In between those two races, though, Red Bull produced one of their worst showings in recent memory at the Hungaroring.

Helmut Marko has called Mekies ‘excellent’ after his promotion from Racing Bulls. He praised him for delegating more responsibility to the various department heads at Milton Keynes.

Even rivals like Toto Wolff and Zak Brown have welcomed Mekies’ arrival. They expect their relations with Red Bull to be much more cordial going forward.

Laurent Mekies must fix Red Bull’s misfiring technical department

Both Horner and Marko have repeatedly pointed to Red Bull’s outdated wind tunnel in explaining the team’s recent decline. They were dominant, at least in the hands of Verstappen, between the start of the ground-effect era in 2022 and the spring of last year.

Red Bull are building a new wind tunnel after explaining that their current model dates back to the Cold War. But Racing Bulls have also used the same facility and built a car that’s believed to be far more compliant, with Isack Hadjar scoring a podium at the Dutch GP.

Hadjar and Liam Lawson have regularly outqualified Yuki Tsunoda, exposing Red Bull’s overreliance on Verstappen’s talents. According to The Limburger, team insiders say the technical department has ‘completely lost its way’.

They’ve ‘tried everything’ to make the RB21 more balanced, introducing a series of major upgrade packages, but ‘nothing seems to work’. That suggests that there’s something ‘fundamentally wrong’.

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Mekies comes from an engineering background, so one would expect him to identify the problems. It may be a process that takes time.

According to reports, Verstappen’s camp already had concerns about the technical department, specifically director Pierre Wache. He took over as Red Bull’s leading designer after Adrian Newey’s departure.

Heading into next year, Toto Wolff says Red Bull are climbing ‘Mount Everest’ as they introduce their own engine. If they can’t optimise their aerodynamics in this context, they could be in trouble.

One suspects that Wolff is trying to catch Verstappen’s attention with his comments. He continues to pursue the four-time world champion for the future even after losing out for 2026.