"Nowhere to hide" - Red Bull offers worrying pace assessment after troubled Dutch GP

Red Bull boss Laurent Mekies has offered a worrying assessment of where the team stands heading into the second half of the Formula 1 season. 

Red Bull had no answer for Mercedes, McLaren or Ferrari at Zandvoort, with Max Verstappen and Liam Lawson comfortably behind the lead three teams on pace. 

Max Verstappen's heavy crash on lap one of the Dutch Grand Prix left the team battling with just a single car. Although Lawson finished in seventh place, he finished as the last driver on the lead lap, well over a minute behind Kimi Antonelli and 47 seconds behind sixth-placed Oscar Piastri. 

"Performance-wise, there is nowhere to hide. It was a very difficult weekend," said Mekies. 

"It seems like we have made a bit of a step back compared to where we were before the summer break.

"Of course, we'll never know what the real pace of the car in the race would have been with Max, but it's fair to say that session after session, it looked more difficult than it was in Budapest or in Spa or in Austria, so some tough work for us to do to regroup and to see if it is simply the competition that has done a better job than us at upgrading the car, or if something has been limiting us more than it should have been in Zandvoort.

"So that will be for us the next two weeks before we fight back in Monza all together."

Red Bull could benefit in Monza through an expected power unit change and grid penalty for Antonelli, but with overtaking far simpler in Italy than Zandvoort, an advantage at the start may not translate into a result come the end of the race. 

Turning back to Verstappen's crash, Mekies added: "The most important thing is that Max is okay. It was a pretty big shunt, and we are all glad to see that he's out of the car, unharmed, and that's what matters the most."