Red Bull identify key area for improvement in second half of F1 season

Laurent Mekies believes Red Bull's key to unlocking more performance in the second half of F1 lies in consistently providing Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar with a car they can work with, after a first half defined by an ever-shifting set of problems.

The Milton Keynes-based squad ended the opening 11 rounds without a victory, sitting fourth in the constructors' championship on 177 points.

Yet the closing stretch of the first half, from Austria through to Hungary, offered genuine encouragement, with Verstappen collecting two second-place finishes and a third from those four weekends, only a DNF at Silverstone — where he looked set for another trip to the rostrum — blotting the copybook.

That uptick in results, however, has not entirely silenced concerns within the garage. Verstappen told Dutch media that the team keeps encountering a different problem every single weekend, while Hadjar, despite acknowledging after Austria that the upgrade package was "delivering," stressed that the car remained "completely off balance" and that "it's not a linear grip, it's not nice. So you're constantly guessing the grip", something Mekies was also quick to point out.

Even in Hungary, where Verstappen crossed the line second to Lando Norris, Hadjar was scathing about the RB22's behaviour, noting that "finding a sweet spot and having something driveable for me was not possible the whole weekend."

Speaking after the Hungarian Grand Prix, Mekies was asked whether he fully understands the core limitations of the RB22 and whether recent weekends had negatively surprised him.

"I'm not really convinced that it is linked to a package or something else," Mekies told media, including RacingNews365. "We have been struggling to give the drivers the car they could have a good balance with.

"Nonetheless, because it's Max, because it's Isack, they very often manage to extract the performance anyway."

Mekies highlighted that when Red Bull has been able to provide Verstappen and Hadjar a stable platform, they have been able to get results from the car.

"But on the tracks where we have managed to do that, we have seen improved performance," the Frenchman added.

"So I think it's about the consistency of the delivery of performance, and it's been a topic for us this season.

"And it's probably where some of the potential improvement is in the second part of the year."