Red Bull confirms reduced upgrades after ‘large deficit’ admission

Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies has conceded the team may not upgrade the RB22 much more after bringing an unusually high number of upgrades so far this season.

Red Bull has already introduced 36 changes to the car it started the season with as it looked to quickly correct issues hampering its competitiveness.

Red Bull unlikely to upgrade much more concedes Mekies

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The Chinese Grand Prix has been the only race of 11 in which Red Bull has not brought an upgrade to its car, with Miami and Austria representing the most major alterations.

The result is an increased level of performance with Max Verstappen scoring more points in the last two races than he did in the first four combined but it could come at a cost with the team restricted by the spending cap.

Teams are capped at $215m for the 2026 season, and the need to stay below that could mean less upgrades in the second half of the season, team principal Mekies has conceded.

“I mean I don’t know for the other guys [but] what is sure is that at some stage we need to make a call on the balance between this year and next year,” he said after the most recent race in Hungary.

“I expect that to happen earlier than what we have done last year especially as regulations are what they are, so we will decide.

“But but as far as we are concerned, you know, we have brought a huge amount of development to the car between race one and here, in order to try to correct as soon as possible the large deficit we had initially.

“It’s probably difficult to imagine that we will continue that rhythm, but we nonetheless need to see what is the best way to try and approach these last weekends.”

Even still, Red Bull’s push to bring a car that Verstappen and Isack Hadjar can compete with has not been perfect with the former being particularly vocal about his frustrations.

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Despite finishing on the podium, Verstappen said he remained unhappy with the car.

“I was still struggling with the same things as yesterday, so the car was just extremely oversteery, just degging quite hard at one point as well,” he said.

“Overall, I still don’t really understand how we are second, but I think as a team we performed strongly. So I see it as a bit of an overperformance compared to what we expected, so I guess that’s, of course, a good thing considering how everything felt. I also saw, when I jumped out of the car again, there was damage on the car for whatever reason. So it was not made easy for us.

“There’s nothing that you can change anyway after qualifying, so I knew that it was going to be tough, and it was very tough. Honestly, I think it was one of the hardest races of this year in terms of how I felt in the car, how I had to manage the balance as well, corner to corner.

“So, to be on the podium, I think, was an incredible result for us.”

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

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