Laurent Mekies isn’t selling fairy tales. After another sharp Red Bull weekend in Singapore — Max Verstappen banking second to pare his championship deficit to Oscar Piastri to 63 points — the team’s new boss batted away any notion of a magic trick behind the upturn. No silver bullet, no single breakthrough. Just the unglamorous grind of a big team finding its way back into the car’s operating window.
The numbers tell the story. Two wins and two second places for Verstappen in the last four races have dragged Red Bull out of a flat midseason and back into the title conversation. It’s been a reminder that the RB21, when it’s happy, is still a blade.
“We’re not looking back, we’re looking forward,” Mekies said on Sunday night, rightly buoyed by a stretch he called “spectacular.” But he was just as quick to spread the praise — and to remove himself from it. “It’s still zero, guys, it’s still zero,” he insisted when asked what he’d contributed so far. “The improvement is due to everyone trying to analyse the limitations of the car, race after race… with extremely strong and clear inputs from Max.”
It’s very Mekies. The former Racing Bulls boss was parachuted into the top job in July after Red Bull GmbH removed Christian Horner from his long-held team principal and CEO roles. The upgrade trail Verstappen is exploiting now was already in motion and signed off under Horner. Mekies, for his part, positions himself as custodian rather than catalyst. He talks about “different ways to run the car,” a “good flow of updates,” and a team that never stopped digging. No drama, just direction.
The context matters. Red Bull’s form has zig-zagged across 2025. Wins in Japan and Imola flagged the car’s baseline, but the middle part of the year turned ugly: one podium in seven, misfortune and misreads compounding the pain. Kimi Antonelli harpooned a blameless Verstappen in Austria. A low-downforce gamble looked clever on Saturday at Silverstone — pole secured — before Sunday’s rain exposed the bet and dragged the RB21 to fifth.
Since the summer break, though, the story has shifted. Verstappen himself has talked about a “different philosophy,” and if that phrase is deliberately fuzzy, it fits the pattern. When this car lands in the right window — ride heights, aero balance, tyre prep, the boring-but-critical stuff — it’s suddenly alive. Singapore wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough to be quick all weekend and bank heavy points.
“There is no single silver bullet,” Mekies said. “It seems we have a competitive package on most tracks, but it’s very difficult to wind back and say, with the upgrades at the beginning of the year, where would we be? We’re not stopping. We’ll stack it again, race by race, and try to see if there is more to come.”
If that reads like a manifesto, Verstappen’s version is the racer’s shorthand. He stopped short of calling Mekies the trigger, but he did offer a nod to the new boss’s fingerprints on the process. “He’s probably being too nice,” the four-time World Champion said. “What is very good is we just approach it as a proper team effort… I do think now we understand why or how we can be better. By asking the right questions, including Laurent being involved in that, it’s just working well.”
Strip the quotes down and you’re left with a familiar truth: performance is rarely about one part or one person. The RB21’s ceiling never vanished; Red Bull’s correlation and confidence did. That, it appears, has been restored — not with flashy upgrades alone, but with choices about setup direction, circuit-specific compromises, and how bold to be on a Saturday when Sunday looks different. Verstappen’s sensitivity to what the car needs has done the rest.
There’s also something to be said for the mood. Whatever you make of the timing of Horner’s exit, Red Bull now presents as… calmer. Mekies is measured in public, and there’s a sense of oxygen returning to the garage. It’s easier to chase marginal gains when the room is quiet.
The title picture remains tight, especially with McLaren’s form line and Piastri’s points cushion. But Verstappen has momentum, and momentum in this sport tends to drag lap time with it. Red Bull doesn’t need a silver bullet over the run-in; it needs exactly what Mekies is preaching — no backward glances, no single saviour, just the next right step.
On recent evidence, they’ve found the path. Now comes the hard part: staying on it.
