Verstappen plays it cool on Horner exit as Red Bull’s bite returns under Mekies
Max Verstappen isn’t making any grand, look-at-me statements about Red Bull’s resurgence. He’s too busy winning again.
A month or so ago, the defending champion looked dead in the water — 104 points adrift of Oscar Piastri after Zandvoort, watching a rampant McLaren pairing collect wins like postcards. Four rounds later, it’s 40 points, a live title fight again, and Red Bull’s season suddenly has a pulse.
So did the leadership switch flick the breaker? Verstappen won’t bite. “You can’t possibly know for sure,” he told De Telegraaf when asked if Christian Horner’s departure and Laurent Mekies’ arrival had sparked the turnaround. What he will say is the mood has changed. “I’m just very happy with how everything is going in the team now. Not only with Laurent, but with all of Red Bull Racing… Everyone is on the same wavelength. For such a big brand and racing team, that’s very important.”
From the outside, the timeline is hard to ignore. Horner’s long, turbulent spell ended after the British Grand Prix, bringing to a close an 18-month saga that had loomed over the team even as it tried to arrest a slide on track. Mekies — the Frenchman who knows Red Bull’s DNA and the operational grind inside out — stepped up, and the car immediately stopped feeling like a moving target.
Italy was the pivot. A new floor went on the RB21 at Monza, balance came back into the window, and Verstappen put down a marker. He backed it up in Baku and Austin, and suddenly the swagger was back — not a strut, but the quiet certainty that made Red Bull so suffocating during the early ground-effect years.
McLaren had dominated the first half of 2025, Piastri and Lando Norris winning 12 of the first 15 and sitting one-two in the standings after Zandvoort. Verstappen, a distant third at that point, didn’t pretend it wasn’t chastening. “At one point this season I was like, this is not going to be anything anymore,” he said. “I went into the season knowing that we didn’t have the best car. And now I still don’t think so, but as a team we know very well how to maximise. We have been adept at that for years.”
That’s the nub of it. Verstappen’s never been moved by the “best car” debate — the needling suggestion that his success begins and ends at the wind tunnel. “I don’t care what other people think,” he shrugged. “But at the same time, sometimes it’s nice that you can show that. That it’s not always just the car.” Give a driver of his calibration a package that’s predictable into the entry phase and faithful on traction, and he’ll extract a weekend from it.
The human side clearly matters and Max didn’t hide it. “I now go to the track with a more pleasant feeling,” he said, nodding to a calmer atmosphere and smoother alignment with Red Bull’s shareholders in Austria and Thailand. “Many people knew that things were not going well, but it is not always easy to solve it.” Now, the messaging is cleaner, the garage voice is singular, and the in-race calls feel less like compromises. Whether that’s Mekies, the car, or the collective reset — likely all three — the effect is the same.
The math remains stern. Verstappen still needs to outscore Piastri by roughly eight points per race the rest of the way, with a little over five per race to haul in Norris. He’s beaten both by bigger margins across the last four, but the run-in rarely obeys averages. The Dutchman knows it. “I have nothing to lose in this title race and have to go all-in.”
McLaren, for its part, has looked rattled only in the margins. The MCL39 is still a deeply quick piece of kit, but the fine-detail edge that made it untouchable earlier in the year has dulled, and Red Bull’s operational tempo — tyre prep, pitstop rhythm, strategy conviction — is back to being a race-winning force multiplier.
As for the question everyone keeps asking: did changing the name on the team principal’s door unlock performance? Cause and effect is messy in Formula 1. Correlation is easier to spot. But it’s impossible to ignore that, under Mekies, Red Bull found balance on and off the track. The lap times say enough.
This fight isn’t done. It’s just finally worthy of the billing.
