Red Bull Racing didn’t win the Austrian Grand Prix, but team boss Laurent Mekies had cause to be just as relieved on Sunday night as victor George Russell.
His team had brought a major upgrade to the weekend, and as the season ticked past the one-third completion mark, Mekies said the success or failure of the new parts would be decisive in whether or not Red Bull Racing could storm back from its poor start to contend for regular wins or even the title.
“It will depend a lot on how this package works,” he said ahead of the round.
“We started with a large gap compared to competition, probably more than a second at the season start.
“We probably halved that gap with the Miami update, and hopefully we get much closer with this one as well.”
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The point of sport is to compete, so the value of an effective upgrade is self-evident.
But left unsaid was the criticality of the update to the team’s most important performance part: Max Verstappen.
Verstappen’s thinking on his future dominated the narrative in the early months of the season, when he threatened to quit Formula 1 if it didn’t change its contentious new engine rules.
Agreement was eventually secured among the disagreeable stakeholders, with a compromise two-season timeline locked in for the watering down of the hybrid elements of the engine, going some way to addressing the criticisms of Verstappen and virtually all his contemporaries.
He’s since suggested that he will continue racing next season in anticipation of a better a sport in 2028, the final year of his contract.
Left unclear, however, is whether his future remains with Red Bull Racing.
Verstappen is widely reported to be free to quit the team if he’s not inside the top two in the drivers championship around the mid-season break. Currently seventh and 58 points behind Russell in second — and 98 points off the lead — he is all but certain to get access to that exit clause.
The Dutchman has long suggested he’s here for a good time, not a long time. He knows first-hand the cyclical nature of F1, having been locked out of title contention during Mercedes’s first championship era before taking a turn dominating the sport himself until last season.
If he’s to make the most of what could be his final chapter in Formula 1 — however long that’s going to be — he knows there’s a chance Red Bull Racing won’t be the place to do it.
Rumours of a potential exit have come and gone, but ESPN this week reported that Verstappen had refused to give Red Bull Racing assurances that he will stay with the team beyond the end of the season.
Let the silly season begin.
Antonelli calm despite Russell victory | 00:42
VERSTAPPEN TO McLAREN?
According to the UK’s Daily Mail, Verstappen and McLaren have commenced “preliminary talks” about the Dutchman joining the team.
McLaren already has reigning champion Lando Norris under contract until the end of next season and Oscar Piastri under lock and key until the end of 2028.
Speaking to Sky Sports at the weekend, McLaren CEO Zak Brown denied the prevailing rumour that he would engineer a straight swap between Verstappen and Piastri.
“I’d be very surprised if Lando or Oscar went elsewhere, because they are very happy,” he said. “Of course they have contracts, but besides that, we’re very happy with them and they are very happy here.
“If for some strange reason someone slipped on a banana peel getting out of the tub, then yes, of course — Max is a four-time world champion.”
That last line is a statement of the obvious rather than a smoking gun or an example of a politician attempting to give themselves wriggle room. Any team boss who said they wouldn’t sign an interested Verstappen if they had a seat available would be lying.
It’s also not the first time Brown has denied a move, having fielded similar questions when McLaren announced it had poached Gianpiero Lambiase, Verstappen’s race engineer, from Red Bull Racing.
Sky Sports has since reported too that talks took place but that they were initiated by Verstappen’s management.
Verstappen’s manager, Raymond Vermeulen, didn’t deny talks but told Germany’s Bild he wasn’t haggling over a contract.
“There’s nothing to it,” he said. “There were no negotiations.”
It’s also worth noting the context that McLaren would be, on paper, a sideway move at best from Red Bull Racing. Though McLaren is the reigning constructors champion, there’s been no signs of last year’s success carrying over into the new regulatory era.
McLaren also an engine customer, and although having a Mercedes motor is clearly a benefit, conventional wisdom states that a team with its own power unit will always have a higher performance ceiling. It’s also worth remembering that over the next two years the rules are swinging towards boosting the internal combustion engine over the hybrid elements, and the FIA has assessed that Red Bull Powertrains has the best petrol motor in the sport.
But with no-one denying the chat outright, instead this seems like a case of Brown was doing what every team chief does: keeping tabs on who’s available. The same goes for Verstappen’s management, whose job it is to know which seats could be up for grabs.
‘Tough races test you psychologically’ | 00:21
IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT NEXT YEAR
That Verstappen’s management would be openly talking to teams — don’t forget those ongoing Mercedes rumours, for example — is even less surprising given the state of the driver market.
Though there nominally as many as 17 drivers out of contract this season, in practice there are no available seats among Red Bull Racing’s three frontrunning rivals.
McLaren is spoken for. Charles Leclerc just signed a long-term deal to stay in Maranello into the next decade, while Lewis Hamilton has at least another year to run on his contract. Mercedes has kept Russell and Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s respective statuses ambiguous, but reports suggest both are now locked down for next year too.
Having these rumours floating around the paddock — and Verstappen’s management has proven well adept at getting its message out through the media in the past — serves two purposes.
The first is to keep Verstappen in the loop for a move for 2028, when some frontrunning seats could open up for him. This comes with the added benefit of giving him time to assess how the competitive order develops over the next 12 months or so given the from guide behind Mercedes has been confusingly inconsistent so far this season.
But it also means Verstappen and his management are using all their available political leverage to motivate Red Bull Racing to find form.
Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that these rumours fired up shortly after reports of another high-profile defection from the team to a rival.
Chief engineer Paul Monaghan, who has been with the team for the entirety of its Red Bull Racing era, will reportedly quit to join Cadillac in the coming seasons.
It’s the latest in an extensive and high-profile brain drain from Milton Keynes, following the pending departure of Lambiase (McLaren) and the exits of chief designers Rob Marshall (McLaren) and Craig Skinner (resigned), chief mechanic Lee Stevenson (Audi), Verstappen front-end mechanic Ole Schack (resigned) chief technical officer Adrian Newey (Aston Martin), sporting director Jonathan Wheatley (Audi, since resigned), head of strategy Will Courtenay (McLaren), team principal Christian Horner (dismissed), motorsport adviser Helmut Marko (retired).
“There are a lot of rumours about the team and the team personnel,” team boss Mekies said, rebuffing but not denying a question over Monaghan’s future. “I don’t think it will be right for me to comment on every single rumour that comes out.”
Personnel churn through the F1 environment regularly and frequently, but Monaghan is emblematic of what at the moment is a specifically Red Bull Racing problem — that the staff leaving are extremely experienced and had previously been considered integral to the team’s success.
They also coincide with Red Bull Racing failing to turn 2023, the most dominant season in history, into a new golden era. Rather than kicking on, the team lost the constructors championship the following year, and Verstappen didn’t have the equipment to defend his drivers title last season.
Hamilton & Verstappen do battle again! | 00:39
WHAT DOES HE HOPE TO ACHIEVE?
Just because Verstappen doesn’t have any suitable options for a 2027 seat away from Red Bull Racing doesn’t mean that he can’t throw his weight around, pushing the team to work harder on the car and on replenishing its talent pool.
“Our goal is to finish this adventure together with Red Bull,” Vermeulen told Dutch paper De Telegraaf. “The spirit of Red Bull and the spirit of Verstappen, they fit together.
“However, we do need a package that allows us to compete at the front. That has always been the foundation.
“We feel at home at Red Bull, but we do want to be competitive. Ultimately, Max wasn’t born to compete in the midfield.”
The message has been received loud and clear at Milton Keynes.
“Max wants a fast car, always wanted a fast car, and he completely trusts us in making sure we are doing everything we can, short term and long term, to ensure return to success and continuous success,” Mekies said ahead of the Austrian Grand Prix weekend. “We look at the result on the track; that’s the only thing that matters, and hopefully those results will improve rapidly.
“I’m not asking Max every week if he’s going to stay. Max has made clear to us that he wants to continue with the team. It’s equally clear that he needs a fast car for him to be happy with the team.
“It’s not a topic for us. The topic for us is get the car back to where we want it to be. If the car is back where we want it to be, there will be no discussion.
“I’m convinced that Max wants to see continuous progress, and he knows very well that you don’t go from one second to zero in no time, but he wants to see that path, I’m sure, to continue to improve.”
It’s why the upgrades brought to Austria were so important — and why Mekies would have been so relieved on Sunday night to see that they’d worked.
Leclerc and Piastri clash in Austria! | 00:42
IS THE AUSTRIA SUCCESS REPEATABLE?
Red Bull Racing’s Austria upgrade was considerable both in terms of the number of new parts and, according to engineering coverage, the way it changed the team’s aerodynamic concept.
Almost every part of the car was modified, from the sidepod inlets, engine cover, floor and floor boards to the rear suspension, rear wing and exhaust.
The package got off to a rocky start, with reliability problems affecting both drivers through practice. The team also took the blame for Verstappen’s qualifying crash, revealing that there had been some sort of aerodynamic failure at the rear of the car on his final lap.
But in race trim there was no doubting the step forward, with Verstappen securing a season-best second place just 1.6 seconds behind Russell.
“This was the first time I felt like actually I could fight for the win,” Verstappen said after the race.
“To be that close to a win is great effort from the team. They have worked really hard to get these upgrades on the car here, and this is the first time in the race where I felt really competitive and I could push a bit more.
“This has already been a very big step forward compared to the previous races.”
The upgrade confirmed Red Bull Racing’s position at the top of the development leaderboard among the frontrunners, a measure of how much each team is moving closer to the fastest lap of any given weekend.
Development rate, frontrunners
1. Red Bull Racing: improving by 0.120 seconds per weekend
2. Ferrari: improving by 0.082 seconds per weekend
3. McLaren: improving by 0.033 seconds per weekend
4. Mercedes: steady
Red Bull Racing’s trajectory would have been even more steeply positive had Verstappen completed his qualifying lap, which had been only 0.1 seconds slower than Russell’s pole time at the end of the second sector.
There are still things to improve, of course.
“Half of the race I ran a car that was not in top shape,” he said, describing a problem at the rear of the car. “Plus my brakes today were not really functioning well compared to the rest of the weekend.”
The Red Bull Ring is also only one circuit of 22 this season. It also sits at high altitude, and this weekend it featured scorching temperatures, with some measurements returning readings in excess of 60°C for track temperature.
We’ve also seen this year that the benefit of a big upgrade package lasts only until another team brings its own update. McLaren almost beat Mercedes with its Miami upgrade, Mercedes then pulled ahead with its own upgrade in Canada, and then Ferrari won with its upgrade in Barcelona. In Austria it was Red Bull Racing’s turn.
But Verstappen is clearly happy to take the upside for now.
“It’s been a pretty long road to be here and actually to sit here in the top three and have a real shot at it. That is already very positive.”
The Dutchman’s words were a pressure release for Mekies and his team.
Now he just has to keep the big results coming.