Red Bull can’t fix F1 car problems by copying Racing Bulls

Red Bull team boss Laurent Mekies has stated his Formula 1 team’s struggles couldn’t be fixed simply by copying elements of a more consistent Racing Bulls car.

Racing Bulls drivers have performed much better than the second Red Bull driver – regardless of the latter being Liam Lawson or Yuki Tsunoda – over the 2025 season so far, collecting no fewer than 45 points when Lawson got none in two rounds at Red Bull while Tsunoda only scored seven in 12 grands prix.

The second Red Bull was outqualified by at least one Racing Bulls on nine occasions (sprint qualifying not included), with even Max Verstappen 0.003s slower than Lawson in Austria.

Red Bull endured one of its worst weekends in recent times last weekend at the Hungarian Grand Prix. Verstappen qualified down in eighth, just ahead of the Racing Bulls, and struggled to ninth place behind Lawson on Sunday.

Following the qualifying session on Saturday, Sky Sports F1 asked Mekies if Red Bull could take things from the Racing Bulls car to find more performance with the RB21 – an idea he ruled out.

“No, I think the question is fair, but there's a genesis of the car,” the Frenchman explained. “Where the cars are coming from is too different for anyone to transfer anything from a car to another. It's what Formula 1 is today.

“You know, it's 10 independent teams all coming with their own ideas about where to develop the car, what difficulties they found along the way, which development paths they have ended up having due to that. And there is nothing you could take from a car to another. It's really down to how it was developed from early on.”

Laurent Mekies, Red Bull Racing Team Principal

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

Mekies said Verstappen’s vast experience was “essential” in such tough times, with the four-time world champion having raced at Red Bull for the past nine years, making them the third-longest F1 partnership behind Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes and Michael Schumacher at Ferrari.

“It's a huge advantage because he knows when the car has been working. He knows when the car has not been working,” Mekies said.

“And especially in a situation like that where it's not so much a balance issue, it's really like we are struggling to find the level of grip we should be having here. And he's certainly been a huge, huge help in these situations.”

Mekies also admitted to “experimenting” unsuccessfully over the weekend at the Hungaroring, failing to find a solution to the RB21’s lack of grip.

“What I can tell you is that it was there from the first lap in FP1,” he said in his post-race media session. “We look at each other and we say, what's going on?

“We could see in all the slow-speed, medium-speed [corners], we are just very slow. It was something, we couldn't say that it was balance-related.

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing, Yuki Tsunoda, Red Bull Racing

Photo by: Guido De Bortoli / LAT Images via Getty Images

“We felt that we couldn't put the car in the right window, we couldn't switch on the tyres. Sometimes it happens in FP1, but not in that magnitude. It felt wrong from the beginning and we tried very many things.

“The good thing is that the guys really went out and tried with both cars different things. It didn't do any difference, we couldn't switch on the tyres. Long run, short run, sometimes it makes you get – by luck or by merit – in the right window, but it never quite happened. And it was like that in qualifying.

“Of course, you can always look at your best sample and think that this was actually alright. But the truth is, on average, it never quite came back. I think it's been a theme this year to say that the window is narrow – and sometimes very narrow. I think today was a lot more than that. Today we were really unable to get the car to run.”

Additional reporting by Ronald Vording