Red Bull spent much of the Miami weekend trying to drag the conversation back to lap time. The paddock, naturally, latched onto something far simpler: how one of its cars ended up illegal in qualifying, while the other sailed through scrutineering and kept a front-row start.
The answer, according to team principal Laurent Mekies, isn’t a tale of clever set-up divergence or a stealth “Verstappen-only” specification. It’s the kind of tiny, brutal mistake that happens in a sport where millimetres are the difference between engineering excellence and a stewards’ report.
Isack Hadjar’s car was found to be outside the 2026 technical regulations after qualifying, with the floor protruding two millimetres beyond the permitted dimensions. The sanction was immediate and uncompromising: disqualified from qualifying and sent to the back of the grid.
Given Max Verstappen was running the same basic package, the assumption in some corners was that Red Bull had either gambled across both cars and simply got caught once — or that Verstappen’s RB had been subtly “cleaned up” while the rookie took the risk. Mekies shut that down.
“They were on the exact same spec,” Mekies said. “We made a mistake in Isack’s car.
“It’s very simple, the car was found to be two millimetres too wide. We should have spotted it earlier in our routine checks. We did not and it’s painful but it’s easy to fix.”
That last line is the sting. Two millimetres isn’t a grey-area interpretation or a brave reading of the rules. It’s the sort of measurement that suggests something in the build process, preparation, or pre-session checking simply didn’t get the scrutiny it normally would. And it’s why Verstappen escaping the same fate isn’t evidence of different philosophy — it’s evidence that one car was, for whatever reason, not identically out of tolerance.
Miami was already shaping up to be a messy one for Red Bull on track. Verstappen had an early spin, and Hadjar’s weekend ended with a race-ending crash. But in the middle of the noise, Mekies pointed to what Red Bull actually came to Florida to learn: whether its recent push has begun to close the gap to the front under the 2026 rule set.
On that score, he sounded as encouraged as a team boss can be when one of his cars has just been thrown out of qualifying on a technicality.
Mekies called the recent progress a “definitive step forward,” framing it in blunt numbers from earlier rounds. “We left Japan 1.2 seconds away from pole,” he said. “China, 1.0 second away from pole.”
The key point for Red Bull is that the steps aren’t happening in isolation. Everyone is developing, everyone is bringing updates, and the midfield in particular has shown it can turn savage when the performance window tightens. Mekies acknowledged as much, and hinted that the gains aren’t just from bolting on new parts — they’ve come from unpicking issues the team knew were hiding lap time.
“Competition was not going to wait for us with their updates. So everybody has updated the car, but certainly we knew that on top of the development race, we had to solve some of our issues, and we knew there was lap time in it,” he said.
He highlighted the swing in qualifying performance across the weekend as a marker of that progress: six tenths off pole on Friday, then less than two tenths off on Saturday. In a championship where small shifts in operating window can move you from “best of the rest” to genuinely annoying the leaders, those deltas matter.
“What number is the correct one? We don’t know, but compared to where we were it’s something much better than anything we have been able to show this year,” he said.
There was also a note of caution about interpreting the race pace, with Mekies conceding it would take time to untangle the “true” performance because Verstappen’s strategy was “very offset.” Still, the broader message was clear: the car is beginning to behave more like the team expects, even if it’s not yet a race-winning weapon.
“I think overall, big picture, again, race pace was strong, confirming the good sign shown in quali, not strong enough for P1 and P2 but perhaps able to see the fight between P3, P4 and P5,” Mekies added, “so again, some things that we had not shown so far this season.”
It’s a very Red Bull weekend in miniature: the upside of genuine performance momentum, wrapped in the downside of execution errors that gift rivals oxygen. The positive for Milton Keynes is that a floor measurement failure is, as Mekies said, easy to fix. The harder part is making sure it never happens again — because the sport’s tolerance for “painful but simple” is precisely zero.
And if Red Bull really has started to turn the corner on raw pace, the last thing it can afford is to keep leaving points and grid positions on the table for reasons that have nothing to do with the stopwatch.
