Red Bull offers Miami F1 hope to Max Verstappen, but not "miracles"

Red Bull team principal Lauren Mekies has vowed the team will bring “improvements” for the Miami Grand Prix in May, but warned Max Verstappen not to expect “miracles”.

Max Verstappen has made his displeasure at the current generation of Formula 1 machinery clear, and admitting that he is considering quitting at the end of the 2026 season.

With Red Bull stuck in the midfield and off the pace of Mercedes, McLaren and Ferrari, significant improvements need to be made in the month without racing.

“[I’m] confident that we will use that break to make a very good step forward,” declared Mekies. “We need time to deep-dive into our data, we need the time to simulate back what we see in the data into the tunnel, into our simulator, try some sensitivities and all of that we can do without racing.

"Does it mean you come to Miami and you have solved everything as a miracle? No, but again, am I confident that the team will get to the bottom of that understanding and start bringing improvements already in Miami. That's what we will see but only the track and the lap time will give us an indication on whether we go into the right directions.”

However, given the significant margin to the current front-running teams, Mekies was cautious not to overextend the potential performance gain of any upgrades.

"I don't think we should expect miracles about the amplitude of closing the gap because the is substantial but what we would like to see is to have a car where our drivers can push again, measure a gap to competitions in these conditions when we are able to push and then the rest will be pure development to the end of the year,” he added.

"We certainly think that in China we made a step back and we measure that not only against the top guys but also against the midfield that got closer to us, so in China we for sure made a step back.

"I don't think it's a product of the number of corners only. There's a layer where in certain cornering speed and cornering conditions we lose some performance compared to what our package is supposed to give us, so this we need to work on.”

Despite the eighth and 12th place finishes of Verstappen and Isack Hadjar respectively at Suzuka, Mekies believes Red Bull was “a touch better in Japan compared to China, especially in the race”.

He said: “We didn't see it because we were again a distant fourth and it doesn't interest anyone to be a distant fourth. But the overall gap is what we have been talking about, it's about one second to the best guys and half a second to the best Ferraris is probably where we are at."