Laurent Mekies has conceded Max Verstappen was “right not to be happy” after the four-time World Champion span out into the Stowe corner gravel trap four laps from the end of the British Grand Prix<\/p>\n
The incident left the driver less than pleased given it came just a week after his huge crash in Q3<\/a> in Austria, and at the end of a weekend when he\u2019d been constantly frustrated by both power unit and handling problems. However, he had still managed to run in P3 until his late crash.<\/p>\n Both incidents were seemingly caused by the rear wing failing to reattach properly at the end of a Straight Mode zone, although the exact cause was different in each case.<\/p>\n Verstappen<\/a> made his feelings about the RB22 clear on team radio as he sat in the car, and he didn\u2019t hold back after the race.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen the rear wing doesn\u2019t close fully, you lose a lot of downforce and you spin off the track,” he said afterwards. “So, yeah. One time, okay, but two times\u2026 This is becoming dangerous for myself. And obviously, I don\u2019t want that.\u201d<\/p>\n It was also painful for all at the Red Bull<\/a> team to hear such strong words, but Team Principal Laurent Mekies understood why Verstappen was so frustrated.<\/p>\n \u201cLook, he’s right not to be happy,\u201d said the Frenchman after the race. \u201cIt is very unpleasant for drivers to be let down by the car in high-speed corners in two consecutive races, let it be for two different reasons. And it is, in a much lower scale, also extremely unpleasant for us as a group to send our drivers to the gravel trap.<\/p>\n \u201cSo he’s right to be unhappy. I have no doubt that, as a team, we will put in place what is necessary for that not to happen again, even if we failed to do that today. And we take that as seriously as one can do, and therefore the minimum that Max can feel today is being unhappy.\u201d<\/p>\n The frustration for Mekies and his team was that they had identified what went wrong in Austria, and a different issue arose at Silverstone.<\/p>\n “We certainly understand what happened at the Red Bull Ring,\u201d Mekies explained. \u201cWe are not going to go into the details, because I don’t think it will be right. But we understand the failure, yes.<\/p>\n \u201cFrom the early analysis of today, we have suffered a different type of failure. It doesn’t make it better, but it is clear that, in front of the succession of events, whether or not the failure is different, that doesn’t really matter.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are going to review the full area to make sure we leave zero chance for that to happen again.\u201d<\/p>\n For the past five races Red Bull has used its version of the \u201cMacarena\u201d or \u201cupside-down\u201d rear wing, an idea pioneered by Ferrari<\/a> in pre-season testing, and also being pursued more recently by McLaren.<\/a><\/p>\n Asked if that choice would now be reviewed, Mekies said: \u201cWe will do whatever is necessary to be on the safe side. We have raced quite a few races with that concept \u2013 we have raced it since Miami, I think. So it’s been a number of races.<\/p>\n \u201cIt’s too early in the analysis to establish whether it’s an issue with the concept, or something else. But we are going for sure to leave no stone unturned when it comes to it, and we have all the options open.\u201d<\/p>\n The Stowe incident aside, Verstappen also highlighted the fact that he had wanted to drop out of parc ferme after Qualifying, take a fresh power unit and change the set-up of the RB22, so unhappy was he with the handling during the weekend.<\/p>\n Such tactics are not unusual for drivers who are near the back of the grid or who are out of position after issues in Qualifying. However giving up a P7 spot would have been costly, as Mekies outlined.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter Qualifying, it was clear we were not very happy with the balance of the car, to say the least,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhilst we knew it wasn’t going to be pleasant to go with a very imperfect balance into the race, we still felt that it will give us a better result than starting from the pit lane with perhaps something better.<\/p>\n \u201cNow, it’s something we have discussed with Max, and I completely accept that he may have a different feeling, and he’s driving the car, so that’s what it is. In the end of the day, there were important learnings today.<\/p>\n \u201cTo his point, the car probably felt similar to what he had yesterday, so we hit the limitations that we knew we had yesterday. I’m not completely sure that we could have been P3 on the road before the failure happened if we had started from the pit lane.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Laurent Mekies has conceded Max Verstappen was “right not to be happy” after the four-time World Champion span…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":782818,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":["post-782817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=782817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782817\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/782818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=782817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=782817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=782817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}