Red Bull Racing hit rock bottom in Hungary, walking away with just two points in what can only be described as a disastrous weekend.
Team advisor Helmut Marko quickly dismissed it as a one-off incident, claiming the team had already identified and solved the problem. But not everyone seems to share his confidence.
“The honest answer is that if we knew what went wrong, we would probably have fixed it,” said VCARB team boss Laurent Mekies when speaking to reporters including GPblog.
The problems appeared immediately, catching the team completely off guard.
“It was there from the first lap in FP1. We looked at each other and said, ‘what’s going on?’ We could see in all the slow speed, medium speed corners, we had just very slow minimum speed.”
This wasn’t just a simple setup issue either.
“It wasn’t something we could say was balance-related. We felt that we couldn’t put the car in the right window, couldn’t switch on the tyres,” Mekies explained.
What made the situation so frustrating was how persistent the problem proved to be.
“Sometimes issues happen in FP1, but not in that magnitude. It felt wrong from the beginning, and we tried so many different things.”
The team threw everything they had at solving the mystery.
“The good thing is that the guys really went out and tried different approaches with both cars. But nothing made any difference. We couldn’t switch on tires for long runs or short runs.”
## What went wrong with Max Verstappen?
Even in qualifying, the team couldn’t find that sweet spot they were looking for.
“Sometimes you get lucky or figure it out and hit the right window, but this never quite happened. And it was like that all through qualifying,” said Mekies. “You can always look at your best lap and think ‘that was actually all right,’ but the truth is, the performance just never came back.”
When faced with the contradiction between his assessment and Marko’s more optimistic view, Mekies was diplomatic.
“It’s been a theme this year to say that the performance window is narrow and sometimes very very narrow. I think today was a lot more than that. Today was really, I think, I got to kick the cup again.”
After the race, Verstappen himself disagreed with Marko’s quick conclusions. The world champion felt his advisor’s statement was premature and wanted to properly analyze with the team what had really happened before making any claims.
The question now is whether this was truly a one-off or the first sign of deeper issues at Red Bull.
