Red Bull will "review" why Max Verstappen's strategy at the United States Grand Prix led to higher-than-expected tyre degradation after the Dutchman questioned the approach taken in Austin.
Verstappen finished third at the Circuit of the Americas, 17.485 seconds behind race winner Kimi Antonelli, after Red Bull ran him on a soft-soft-medium strategy. Antonelli's medium-to-hard one-stop proved to be the pace-setting approach for the Mercedes driver.
The four-time F1 champion suggested after the race that the strategy did not match what had been agreed beforehand, though Mekies said he had not heard the specific comments.
Speaking to media, including RacingNews365, Mekies said: "I'm not sure what he was referring to because I didn't hear what he said.
"But I think one thing that may have surprised him is the fact that we elected to put him on the soft for the second stint, which was the baseline option for us.
"Unfortunately, as you may have seen in that second stint, we suffered fairly high degradation. So it is probably one of the things we will review together on why we degraded that much in that second stint."
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Mekies - 'We struggled to use that advantage'
Red Bull split its strategies between Verstappen and team-mate Isack Hadjar, who crossed the line sixth, but Mekies insisted the choice of tyres or strategy had little bearing on the result against Antonelli.
"I think Kimi had more pace than us," said Mekies. "I don't think we can use any excuse of tyres or of strategy. Kimi was faster. Fair play and well done to him.
"It's probably fair to say that one-stop and two-stop were very close in terms of race times. We split our cars, as you saw.
"It's also probably fair to say that we normally enjoy a bit of an advantage compared to the competition with the softer compounds, and we struggled to use that advantage.
"We suffered some fairly high deg with Max on the two sets of soft compounds that we had, and that certainly didn't help."
Also interesting:
Join RacingNews365's Ian Parkes, Sam Coop and Nick Golding as they look back on the United States GP and look ahead to Mexico City! Red Bull's return of gearbox gremlins is a lead discussion, as is Kimi Antonelli being just days away from becoming world champion.
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