Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies has claimed the team's upgrade package introduced at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix has given the outfit "another edge" over its F1 rivals, closing a gap that had been narrowing steadily since the start of the season.
The Milton Keynes-based team scored its first double-podium finish for two and a half years on Saturday, with Max Verstappen crossing the line 0.196 seconds behind race winner George Russell, and team-mate Isack Hadjar third.
However, it is still to end its victory drought this season, and is in danger of being without a win during a campaign for the first time since 2015.
Speaking about the team's development trajectory, Mekies pointed to the long stretch between the season-opening race in Australia and the Baku weekend, during which no major package had arrived, yet the gap to the front had still shrunk.
"As we have seen this year, the pecking order has been alternating based on the timing of the upgrades," said Mekies, speaking to the media, including RacingNews365.
"What is important, however, is that in the fairly long time frame between Australia and now, where we didn't have a big package coming, we have nonetheless managed to close that gap.
"If you look at Madrid [Spanish GP], we were a tenth and a half from pole, and I think we were two tenths from pole in Monza [three tenths to Alpine's Pierre Gasly].
"So we have managed to close that gap, with everyone in the team, on the chassis side, PU side, extracting from the actual car specifications.
"Then yes, the upgrade [in Baku] has given us another edge and eaten up that last tenth. We need to see how it will go on other tracks. How we then react to the other competitors, this I cannot say."
Red Bull's narrow window problem
But Mekies also acknowledged that Red Bull's power unit, while strong on outright potential, remains difficult to exploit consistently across a full lap and a full race distance.
The 2026 power units run without an MGU-H, leaving the 350kW MGU-K as the sole means of electrical harvesting, a change that has made energy management far more sensitive to circuit layout and deployment strategy across the grid.
Discussing the scale of the challenge his engineers have faced at Milton Keynes and trackside, Mekies said: "We have said a few times that we have a fantastic PU.
"But we have a fairly narrow band to use it at best, and it takes a lot of energy from everyone back in Milton Keynes, and at the racetrack, to try to keep us in the narrow window of performance. That's what we do every day.
"Every track comes with this chance of how you do that, and you hear it with our great communication with our drivers.
"Getting the right energy management, the right deployment, and the right power is certainly something that keeps us busy."
Originally published by RacingNews365 —
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