While the sister team Racing Bulls built a much more constant car, Red Bull is fighting problems in the 2025 Formula 1 season. According to Red Bull team boss Laurent Mekies, it is not possible to simply copy the concept of the more stable car.
The reason for this is that the cars differ too much in their basic construction, which is why copy-and-pastes would not work.
Max Verstappen holds the Red Bull flag as well as it can, but the Racing Bulls drivers were usually better than his teammate-regardless of whether it was Liam Lawson or Yuki Tsunoda. Racing Bulls gets 45 points, while Lawson went out in two races and tsunoda only scored seven points in twelve Grand’s Prix. The second Red Bull was beaten nine times by Racing Bulls in qualifying – except sprint qualifies.
Therefore, the question is logical why Red Bull does not simply copy the concept of Racing Bulls to get the problems under control. “” The question is logical, but this is a completely different car, “says Red Bull team boss Mekies.” The cars are too different, so that nothing can be transferred from one vehicle to another. This is how Formula 1 is nowadays. “
No car is the same as the other
“There are ten independent teams and everyone has their own ideas on how to develop the cars,” continued Mekies. “You have found a different way. Therefore, something cannot simply be put from one car to the other. It is about how development started.”
Red Bull currently has to rely on Verstappen, with which the team got four titles. The Dutchman has been part of Red Bull for nine years and thus represents the third longest driver team relationship in Formula 1 history-behind Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes and Michael Schumacher at Ferrari. He knows the car and can therefore get out more than a relatively new driver.
“This is a big advantage because he knows when the car works,” said Mekies. “He also knows the car when it doesn’t work. It is not so much a problem with the balance, but we simply lack the necessary grip. In such situations, of course, it is of great help.”
Hungary was a disaster
But everything went wrong in Hungary: Red Bull “experimented” around Mekies, but the team did not find the necessary grip. The car was too slow in the slow and medium -fast curves. “We just didn’t get the car in the right window,” he says. “We didn’t get the tires there.” From then on, Red Bull kept trying new solutions.
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“But that made no difference,” Mekies clarified. “Sometimes we accidentally catch it on the short or long runs, but that has never happened. It was no different in qualifying. It is a topic of the year, how tight the window is, sometimes even very narrow. Today it was even worse. We just didn’t get the car into the window.”