The ‘mea culpa’ of the Red Bull team principal
Red Bull raised its head in Miami, although the haul was not so plentiful (14 points, all collected by Max Verstappen). The updated RB22 allowed the Dutchman to secure the front row in qualifying, a significant leap forward considering that in Japan the four-time world champion had not managed to reach Q3 unlike his teammate Isack Hadjar.
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Hadjar, however, had a bad weekend in Florida, ending badly in the wall after a few laps. The French driver was supposed to start in the fifth row, but was disqualified because his Red Bull presented an irregularity on the floor.
The qualifying gap from Verstappen for Hadjar was heavy, almost a second, but Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies explained that the gap is not entirely attributable to driving: “Hadjar in qualifying had a performance deficit on the straight compared to Verstappen because of us, I will not go into details – Mekies said as reported by L’Equipe – just after the race accident I went to tell him that it was not his fault if he found himself at the back of the grid after qualifying. I would not define his weekend in Miami as worrying, on the contrary, I believe that in the race he would have shown himself to be quite strong because his lap times were very fast.”
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