"It is painful and difficult to accept," claims Mekies after Red Bull's dismal day at Sao Paulo
Having endured a shock result in qualifying for today's Sao Paulo Grand Prix, Red Bull's team boss Laurent Mekies claimed that it was " painful and difficult to accept."
Max Verstappen had a great initial start iin the Sao Paulo F1 Sprint to pick off Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso and run fifth. Following the restart, he had to defend his position from the Spaniard, but managed to stay ahead.
However, the reigning champion was unable to close in on Mercedes driver George Russell, and had to content with a fourth place.
The Grand Prix qualifying saw Verstappen struggle for grip, and although he had time to complete two flying laps on a fresh set of softs in the dying moments of Q1, he did not manage to make it out of Q1.
His team-mate Yuki Tsunoda started the Sprint from the pit lane as Red Bull opted to test out a different downforce set-up. The Japanese driver was unable to gain any points in the 100km dash, and he ended up only 19th fastest in the main qualifying session.
Commenting on Red Bull's day at Sao Paulo, team boss Laurent Mekies said: “Today has not been a positive day for the Team, but one we will try and learn from. The Sprint was tough and we did not have the pace to fight for the win. We managed to stay not too far off the leaders though and brought home some points with Max in P4.
"We were not happy with where we were after the Sprint, so we decided to make a number of changes. It is part of the risk taking we felt was necessary to see if we could get more out of the car. It didn’t work and if anything, it went in the opposite direction and clearly, we lost a lot of competitiveness.
The Frenchman continued: "It is painful and difficult to accept but it is what happens when you take risks sometimes and the best we can do is to learn from it and see where we can improve the car from here. It’s fair to say we are missing the right window for the car for this circuit, in these conditions.
"That is where the effort will go and we will look at the options to see how we can improve the situation. All the Team is fully focussed to get both cars into a more competitive place for the race tomorrow," Mekies concluded.
