Max Verstappen and Helmut Marko attributed Red Bull’s surprising dominant victory at the Italian Grand Prix to a change in the car setup approach under the new boss, Laurent Mekies. Verstappen took pole position and then won at Monza with ease, beating the normally untouchable McLarens by almost 20 seconds, the largest margin of victory any driver has had this season. It was Red Bull’s first victory in a Grand Prix that did not occur under the leadership of Christian Horner, who was replaced as team principal by former engineer Mekies at the end of July. The result, and Verstappen’s podium finish at the Dutch Grand Prix seven days earlier, represented a significant shift in form compared to before the summer break. Verstappen has been very explicit in the last 18 months about Red Bull’s volatile car, which was previously a world champion in 2022 and 2023, the four-time world champion said that the team is approaching each weekend with a clearer focus in terms of how to get the most out of it.
Verstappen went on to explain that extreme changes had occurred, demonstrating that they did not have full control or fully understand what to do. With Laurent, who has experience in engineering, he’s asking the right questions to the engineers, common sense questions, so I think that works very well. Also, you try to understand the things you’ve tested, that at some point some things give you an idea of a direction, and we continue working on that. I definitely felt that in Zandvoort we already took a step that seemed to work quite well, and then here another step that felt a bit better again. Formula 1 cars rarely change fundamentally overnight: lead times are important and updates are always in the works for a while, so any new part arriving on the Red Bull car now would have been part of a process initiated under Horner’s supervision.So far we’ve had many races where we were just shooting left and right a bit with the car setup.
Max Verstappen
Marko highlighted that Laurent is an excellent engineer, so now the idea is to take what the simulation shows us, but mix it with the experience that Max has and with the experience that our race engineers have. That’s how we want to make a car that is more predictable and manageable. Basically, it’s the same product we had before, only some updates arrived and they are working. But 20 seconds over McLaren, I wouldn’t have predicted that. Verstappen’s victory was the third of the season and the first since the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix in May. Although he was considered an outsider for the title at the beginning of the year, he has now moved away from the fight for the title. It’s third, 96 points behind the championship leader, Oscar Piastri.The difference is that the preparation for a weekend is different now.
Helmut Marko
