Red Bull boss admits radio failures must end this year but start woes will persist until 2027

Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies has conceded that the team’s radio failures are unacceptable and must be resolved before the end of the 2025 season, but warned that the persistent start problem is more complex and will not be fully addressed until 2027.

The admission came after a difficult Sunday at the Circuit of the Americas, where Max Verstappen secured a podium finish that several team members privately acknowledged represented the ceiling of what was achievable. Kimi Antonelli’s race pace was widely regarded inside the Red Bull paddock as impossible to match, but frustration ran deeper than the result itself — both Verstappen and rookie Isack Hadjar felt the team had left performance on the table through self-inflicted errors.

Hadjar was candid in the media pen after the race. “At the moment, it’s the little things we can’t do,” he said. “I have poor radio, I don’t even know what’s happening. And whenever I drop the clutch, it’s going into a nightmare. If we fix these two issues, we might already be on the podium. It seems like we can do the hardest things, but we can’t do the silly things.”

The Frenchman’s reference to “the hardest things” pointed to Red Bull’s broader recovery arc this season. In Australia, China and Japan, the team’s average race-pace deficit to the front of the field was 1.2 seconds per lap — a gap that has since been substantially closed, a significant technical achievement over the course of a campaign.

Mekies, however, was careful to separate the two recurring issues when pressed on Hadjar’s comments. The radio problems — which have now affected the team in consecutive races — are a straightforward reliability failure that a constructor of Red Bull’s resources should not be tolerating, he said. The start weakness is a different matter entirely, rooted in deeper technical constraints that the current regulations make difficult to resolve mid-cycle.

Verstappen’s own frustration in Austin extended beyond the radio and starts. The four-time world champion was unhappy with strategic calls during the race, particularly the team’s decision to persist with softer tyre compounds at a point when the harder option appeared to be working better for rivals. Inconsistent power unit behaviour added to a Sunday that, despite ending with a trophy, left little cause for celebration in the Red Bull motorhome.

With the season entering its final phase, the pressure is now on Mekies and his engineers to deliver on the radio fix before the chequered flag falls on 2025 — while managing expectations that the start problem will remain a vulnerability into next year and beyond.