Still without a victory in 2026, Red Bull knows in which area it must improve to allow its drivers to fully exploit the RB22.
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After eleven Grands Prix, Red Bull is only in fourth place in the constructors’ championship with 177 points. An unusual situation for the Austrian team, which has not yet won a single race since the start of the season.
The last rounds before the summer break nevertheless brought some reasons for satisfaction. Between Austria and Hungary, Max Verstappen notably secured two second places and a third position. At Silverstone, the Dutchman also seemed able to reach the podium before his retirement.
For Laurent Mekies, this progress should not hide the main weakness of the RB22: its behavior remains far too unpredictable from one weekend to another.
An RB22 still too difficult to understand
Max Verstappen has regularly complained about seeing a different problem appear at each Grand Prix. Isack Hadjar also highlighted the difficulties encountered in finding the right settings.
After the Austrian Grand Prix, the Frenchman admitted that the upgrades brought by Red Bull were working, but still described a car “completely unbalanced”.
“The grip is not linear, it is not pleasant. We therefore constantly have to guess the level of grip”, he explained.
The problem manifested again in Hungary. Despite Verstappen’s second place behind Lando Norris, Hadjar was still not satisfied with the behavior of his car.
“Finding the right operating window and having something driveable for me was not possible throughout the weekend.”
Mekies wants more consistency
Asked after the Hungaroring race, Laurent Mekies does not think the difficulties can be attributed to a single element of the RB22. The Red Bull director rather believes that his team struggles to regularly provide its drivers with a car properly balanced.
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“I am not really convinced that this is related to a set of parts or anything else”, Mekies explains. “We have had trouble giving the drivers a car with which they could find a good balance.”
Verstappen and Hadjar’s performances sometimes mask these difficulties.
“Nevertheless, because they are Max and Isack, they very often manage to extract the car’s performance despite everything.”
When Red Bull manages to place the RB22 in its proper operating window, its potential becomes much more obvious. It is precisely this ability to reproduce the right conditions from one circuit to another that Mekies wants to improve.
Red Bull’s main objective
For the French manager, the priority for the second part of the season will therefore be less about finding a miracle solution than about making the RB22’s performance more predictable.
“On the circuits where we managed to give them this car, we noticed an improvement in performance”, he continues.
“So I think it is about delivering these performances with more consistency. This has been a topic for us since the beginning of the season and it is probably where part of our potential for progress lies for the second half of the year.”
Still searching for its first victory in 2026, Red Bull will now have to turn the progress glimpsed before the summer break into regular performances if it really wants to get back in touch with Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren.
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