Red Bull boss Laurent Mekies reflected on a tricky 2026 F1 United States GP as Max Verstappen finished 3rd, with Isack Hadjar down in 6th.
Before he revealed in Red Bull’s press release that the four-time World Champion picked up some damage from debris on Lap 8, the French engineer turned Team Principal discussed a difficult race for his drivers.
From P2 and P3 on the grid, both drivers had bad launches, with Hadjar immediately falling to P5. Verstappen was overtaken by Leclerc into the esses, but he had him back in the low-speed Turn 16.
However, the Ferrari driver would eventually win out as an eight-lap tyre offset in the final stint allowed him to make the pass for 2nd. Had it not been for the VSC to remove Valtteri Bottas’ Cadillac, Lewis Hamilton would have come through as well.
A bizarre power issue following his stop hampered Isack Hadjar and cost him a top 5 finish, ending up behind Lando Norris at the flag. The power problems, especially early in the stint, cost him an easy shot to pass the Brit late in the race.
Laurent Mekies admits Kimi Antonelli was too fast for Red Bull at 2026 F1 United States GP
Speaking in his print media session post-race, the former Racing Bulls Team Principal believed the champion elect had too much pace for Red Bull in Austin.
While the race pace was unbelievably strong across the triple-header, with very low deg in Singapore key against Ferrari, it turned around at COTA. Verstappen had high deg in all three stints, as Red Bull went for the S-S-M with him. Hadjar did a S-H race; it was working pretty well until his issue after the stop.
“I think Kimi had more pace than us today; I don’t think we can use any excuse of tyres or of strategy. I think Kimi was faster than us today, fair play and well done to him.
“It’s probably fair to say that one-stop and two-stop looks very close in terms of race times. We split our cars, as you have seen. Ferrari was on two stops and McLaren was on one-stop. So I think in race times they were probably very, very close.
“It’s probably fair to say that we normally enjoy a bit of an advantage compared to competition with softer compounds and today we have struggled to use that advantage. We have suffered some fairly high deg with max on the two sets of soft compounds that we had. And that certainly didn’t help materialising the second stop.
Hard tyre could have potentially given Max Verstappen P2
When it was put to Laurent Mekies after the 2026 F1 United States GP whether P2 was possible if they used the hard tyres for the final stint, he conceded it could have happened.
Although Max Verstappen had big deg on both soft tyre stints towards the end of them, the team put him on mediums for a long 26-lap stint. By the end, his tyres were not in good shape and he was a lot slower than the Ferrari duo. As well as that, Antonelli and Norris both showed how good the hard compound was before the four-time World Champion’s second stop.
“I cannot exclude it.
“In the end, the hard tyres seemed to perform very well on some of our competitors. So it may have been the case.
“If you finish a few tenths or a couple of seconds [4.4] behind Charles, you are always going to think that more resilient tyres could have helped you. We will never know.
“But it’s fair to say that as we touched on before, we didn’t seem to extract as much extra performance from the softer compounds today relative to the others.”
Mekies says a review will take place on Red Bull’s F1 strategy
Speaking to Viaplay post-race, Max Verstappen said the S-S-M strategy was not talked about in the pre-race briefing.
While Mekies did not want to go into a specific reply on those comments, he did admit it would have been a surprise for his lead driver to have seen softs go on at the first stop in the 2026 F1 United States GP.
Ultimately, high tyre degradation was key in Verstappen losing out to Charles Leclerc.
“Look, 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 in the second stint on soft. That was certainly not the baseline option for us.
“Unfortunately, as you have seen in that second stint, we also suffered fairly high degradation, so it was probably one of the things we will review together on why we degraded that much in that second stint.”
