Laurent Mekies has a massive task on his hands to turn Red Bull’s operation back into a winning one after struggling for the last few seasons.
Even though Max Verstappen won the drivers’ championship last year, they spent the second half of the campaign clearly trailing McLaren, and 2025 has been the same case.
It would be wise for Mekies to focus on making sure that the team are well placed for the 2026 F1 regulations, especially since they are making their own power units.
But that would be an admission of failure by Red Bull for the first time since 2020. They’re not building the positive momentum that they would hope into the new rules.
Red Bull now fear a ‘personnel haemorrhage’ amid rumours that ex-boss Christian Horner could join a rival team in the future.
Losing more talent than they already have would be detrimental. It could convince Verstappen to move to 542-point Mercedes rivals for next season.
Photo by Kym Illman/Getty ImagesLaurent Mekies’ ‘best use’ at Red Bull is to help fix Yuki Tsunoda in 2025
Helmut Marko has fired Red Bull a ‘disaster’ warning and wants to see improvements from the team coming very soon.
The trend that their car has followed is not positive, and it has hurt Yuki Tsunoda’s confidence this season. He cannot seem to find a strong result in the RB21.
Jolyon Palmer believes that new boss Mekies will be able to help get the best out of the Japanese driver, and that it could be his ‘best use’ of time in 2025.
“I think that’s probably the best use of him in the immediacy. Is to work out where, because if you’ve got two cars that are the same, you have to understand why one driver is so good, and the other one isn’t,” he told the F1 Nation podcast.
“Even Red Bull as a team are scratching their heads thinking ‘How can no one get near Max?’ So when you’ve got now a team principal that hasn’t worked with Max in this capacity.
“Christian had sort of developed Max into the champion that he is, always coming through with Red Bull and they won their titles together. Laurent has actually come from working with Yuki Tsunoda and with Liam Lawson in the past,” continued Palmer.
“That was his first foray into being a team principal. He’s kind of the underdog mentality, so I think he’s going to be definitely arm around Yuki, and thinking, ‘Come on, you were great when you drove with me, you were qualifying up in the front three rows. What is going on here?’
“And trying to understand the second driver role a bit more, which I think will be helpful. Whether or not he’ll be able to actually find a performance there is, is obviously the bigger head scratcher for the team.”
How poor has Yuki Tsunoda’s 2025 F1 season been so far?
Just 12 races into the season, and Tsunoda’s best result of the year is a ninth place he earned in Bahrain in his second race for Red Bull.
He’s currently on a run of five races without a point, and at the same stage last year, he had already managed two seventh-place finishes.
In total, he had seven separate points finishes after 12 rounds, compared to just three this year, and was driving what is theoretically a worse car.
However, the crucial difference is that it may be a lot easier to set up and drive than the RB21. Mekies’ task, knowing Tsunoda from the Racing Bulls setup, is to get him driving at a 2024 level again at the very least.