Red Bull's race-start problem will not be fully fixed until 2027, Mekies admits

Red Bull will carry their race-start problems into 2027, team principal Laurent Mekies has admitted, after Isack Hadjar lost two positions off the line at the United States Grand Prix in Austin and publicly called for the clutch to be redesigned.

Hadjar dropped from third to fifth when the lights went out, attributing the poor launch to “clutch over delivery”. The situation was compounded when both he and Max Verstappen suffered radio failures during the race, prompting Verstappen to joke that the team should “start communicating in sign language”.

Mekies acknowledged the radio issues were straightforward in nature but frustrating in persistence. “We are all frustrated to struggle for the second race in a row with the radio issues,” he told reporters. “It’s making everyone’s lives very difficult. It’s something that we would like to fix quite quickly because it’s an item that should be working without using too much of our energy.”

On the starts, however, he was candid about the scale of the challenge. “The start is a slightly more complex issue to solve,” Mekies explained. “Start performance goes across pretty much all the departments of the company, probably except aerodynamics. It’s engine, it’s gearbox, it’s clutch, it’s many things. We have certainly seen from the beginning of the season that we are not the benchmark in terms of launch performance.”

Mekies noted that Red Bull’s improved overall pace has made the deficit at the start more visible and more costly. “You may remember how bad our starts were at the beginning of the year. We are still not the benchmark. The fact that the car in the meantime improved a lot and is fighting closer to the front makes that deficit even more painful now because competition around us is very strong.”

While he expressed confidence that the team would continue to narrow the gap race by race through incremental adjustments, he was clear that a comprehensive solution is beyond the current car. “I equally know that we will not be the benchmark before the end of the season, that it will require some significant design and hardware changes, and that this is something we will see only next year.”

On the radio failures, Mekies admitted the team has yet to identify the root cause, adding another layer of uncertainty to a difficult stretch for the Milton Keynes outfit.