Red Bull boss defends decision to ignore Max Verstappen's British GP demand

Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies has defended the team’s decision not to agree with Max Verstappen’s desire to drop out of parc ferme for a pitlane start at Silverstone.

Verstappen was frustrated by power unit and handling issues throughout the British GP weekend.

Despite qualifying seventh, he was so pessimistic about his prospects for the race that he wanted to change both the PU and the setup and sacrifice 15 places by taking a punt on starting from the pitlane.

The team's decision was not to follow that path, and instead keep his grid spot with an unchanged package. After spinning out of P3 due to a wing issue, Verstappen reiterated his pre-race preference.

“It's just painful, frustrating,” he said. “You're trying everything you can. The whole weekend, I'm not happy with the car balance, I'm down on top speed on my side of the garage. Same again today in the race. 

“If it was up to me, I would have started from the pit lane, but at the moment I'm honestly just looking forward to go home and not think about F1.”

Mekies stressed that had Verstappen started from the back of the field even with a significantly better package he would not have reached the same position that he ultimately did before retiring.

“After qualifying, it was clear we were not very happy with the balance of the car, to say the least,” said Mekies. “And changing the set-up of the car will simply mean starting from the pit lane. 

“And whilst we knew it wasn't going to be pleasant to go with a very imperfect balance into the race, we still felt that it will give us a better result than starting from the pit lane, with perhaps something better.

“Now, it's something we have discussed with Max, and I completely accept that he may have a different feeling, and he's driving the car. So that's what it is. But in the end of the day, there were important learnings today.

“To his point, the car probably felt similar to what he had yesterday, so we hit the limitations that we knew we had yesterday.

“I'm not completely sure that we could have been P3 on the road before the failure happened if we had started from the pitlane.”

Mekies also addressed the fact that Isack Hadjar has not been as vocal about the RB22’s shortcomings as his more experienced team mate.

“At first, Max is unhappy with the car balance, that's a fact,” he said. “What it means is that he feels that the underlying performance of the car could bring into much better results if we are managing to solve the balance limitations we are having.

“I think Isack reads the same balance limitation, a similar balance limitation, so we are not in a situation where one driver says A, and the other drivers say B. They are describing the same thing, but they are describing it in a different way. 

“I think Max is projecting what he feels the potential of the car will be, whilst Isack, being a bit more new to the game, probably doesn't elaborate into that so much.”

Asked about the switch in form between Austria and Silverstone he said: “It's a good representation of the complexity of where we are with the car. Now, a week ago, we are fighting for the win, and pretty much a few days later, here in Silverstone, we were hitting some pretty strong limitations that stopped us from extracting everything we could out of our package. 

“Yes, we think it's compounding with a track like Silverstone, when there is an energy starving, we seem to be struggling more. So on tracks where energy limitations are strong, we seem to be struggling more compared to competition. And in that respect in I'm afraid Spa is probably in that category as well.”