Formula 1 News: Mekies’ Engineering Background key to Red Bull revival

(GMM) Red Bull’s sudden return to form after Christian Horner’s dismissal has not gone unnoticed by anyone – least of all by those who once worked alongside the ousted team boss.

Former Red Bull driver Robert Doornbos says the team’s transformation under Laurent Mekies (pictured) must be difficult for Horner to watch, even if his bank account was helped by what is believed to be a $100 million severance package.

“It was an incredible decision by the Red Bull board to fire Christian Horner mid-season,” Doornbos told the Pit Talk Podcast. “Nobody saw that coming – not the team, but not Christian himself as well.”

Doornbos, however, admitted the change has proved effective.

“It’s strange to see, and it must be confronting for Christian,” he said. “After two weekends, he won his first Grand Prix,” he added, referring to Mekies, whose calm, engineering-led style is viewed as the opposite of Horner’s.

Dr Helmut Marko agrees that the Frenchman’s technical background has given the operation fresh energy. “He’s established a different approach to technical setup,” the Austrian told Sky Deutschland.

“We’re no longer miles off on Fridays like we used to be. We had almost given up on everything in the summer, and now everyone is really hungry again. That creates a great dynamic.”

With Max Verstappen back to dominant form and rabidly chasing down the leading McLarens, Marko believes Red Bull now has no obvious weaknesses.

“There is no longer a track where we would have to say that we are at a disadvantage,” he said.

Writing in La Gazzetta dello Sport, technical analyst Paolo Filisetti described what has actually changed inside Milton Keynes since Mekies’ arrival. He noted that from Monza onward – coinciding with the debut of a new floor and the team’s adoption of Ferrari-style simulator setup routines – Red Bull began preparing its baseline setup far more precisely before each weekend.

According to Filisetti, this intensified simulator work “reduced the margin for error and therefore time loss, which is crucial in a Sprint format weekend,” allowing the team to arrive with a more refined baseline and execute flawlessly on-site.

He wrote that since Mekies took charge, “many things, silent and barely visible from the outside, have changed,” showing how leadership details “can determine seemingly insignificant differences which, in fact, are only apparently so.”