Red Bull’s Monza leap wasn’t magic. It was method.
Max Verstappen’s 19-second stroll at the Italian Grand Prix snapped the team’s winless run since Imola and, more intriguingly, hinted at a philosophical reset under new boss Laurent Mekies. The Frenchman won’t take a victory lap for it — he’s called his contribution “zero” — but the shift is clear: less worship of the simulator, more trust in the seat of the pants.
Helmut Marko put it bluntly: the engineers are “listening more to the driver.” When your driver is Verstappen, that’s not exactly a bad north star. The top-speed gain at Monza was the headline, keeping McLaren honest on the straights, but the bigger picture is how Red Bull arrived there.
Mekies, a proper engineer by trade, has encouraged the team to get its hands dirty with setup. Verstappen admitted they’d spent too long “shooting left and right” with extreme changes — a sign they didn’t have a handle on the RB’s window. Recent weekends have been a rolling experiment: Zandvoort, Budapest, Monza, all used to peel back what’s actually working. The pattern started to emerge in the Netherlands, improved again in Italy, and the car’s manner has looked calmer since.
There was hardware behind that Monza step, too. Red Bull brought a circuit-specific aero kit: a revised floor body with new fences and edge detail, plus shorter-chord front wing flaps. Those parts take months to design and manufacture, so Mekies won’t claim authorship — nor does he try. But he calls that package “the biggest effect” at a track that brutally exposes inefficiency. Last year’s Monza was dire by their standards; this year’s was brisk and tidy.
Where Mekies is already leaving fingerprints is in the way Red Bull uses its tools. Less blind faith in the numbers, more common-sense interrogation. That’s not anti-simulation — it’s about aligning what the driver feels with what the data says, and not wasting Fridays chasing ghosts. The result? A car that responds to smaller, more confident steps rather than wild swings.
Baku offers a good audit of whether that carries. The street circuit serves up violent braking zones, low-drag compromise, and on Friday it added “impressive” winds that turned corners into coin tosses depending on grandstand cover. Even so, Verstappen parked the car second in final practice, 0.222s behind Lando Norris, which squares with what Mekies has been preaching: Red Bull’s back in the fight but not out of reach for McLaren and Ferrari.
“We’re in a better place than three, four, five races ago,” Mekies said, while warning that Monza form doesn’t automatically travel. That’s the crux of Red Bull’s 2025 challenge. The outright pace is there in patches; the trick is stitching weekends together without having to reinvent the setup between FP1 and qualifying.
Marko’s endorsement of Mekies as an “excellent engineer” wasn’t subtle, and Verstappen’s reaction post-Monza was telling. He praised the questions being asked — the right ones — and that matters in a team recalibrating after a turbulent spell. There’s a sense of the garage breathing out, using Fridays more productively, and trusting Verstappen’s compass. It sounds obvious. In F1’s simulation arms race, it isn’t.
The top-speed bump at Monza suggested Red Bull found some efficiency they’d been missing, and the car looked freer off the slow exits. That’s relevant at Baku, where you need both point-and-shoot traction and a car that doesn’t fall apart with a skinny wing down the 2.2km straight. If the team really has tightened its operating window, it’ll show in how consistently Verstappen can push without the balance snapping from corner to corner as the wind swings.
Caveats remain. McLaren has been razor sharp across a variety of layouts, Ferrari is always dangerous on streets, and Red Bull’s margin for error is smaller than it used to be. But the body language is different now. The setups look sensible. The driver feels heard. And the stopwatch — finally — is nodding along.
Monza was proof of concept. Baku will tell us whether Red Bull’s reset has legs.
