Red Bull boss responds to George Russell’s ‘team to beat’ claim

SINGAPORE – Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies did not deny George Russell’s assessment that the Milton Keynes-based squad is now the ‘team to beat’ in Formula 1, after two wins in a row for Max Verstappen.

The Mercedes driver was among those to place Red Bull at the front of the current pecking order, with Mercedes’ most recent upgrade yet to prove its full effects.

Is Red Bull F1’s ‘team to beat’? Laurent Mekies responds

Verstappen took his first victories of this new regulation set at the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia, quickly following that up with a clean sweep, taking pole and victory in both the Singapore Grand Prix Sprint and the main event.

After the race at Marina Bay, Russell reassessed Mercedes’ placing in the pecking order, with the Silver Arrows having been comfortably the favourites for much of the year.

He told PlanetF1.com and accredited media: “The performance of Red Bull has been very impressive the last three weeks on three very different circuits and, right now, they are the team to beat.”

Teammate Kimi Antonelli disagreed, however, saying that Mercedes has yet to make the most of its latest update package.

Russell’s theory was put to the Red Bull team principal and, while the team has largely played down its performance potential this season, he acknowledged that the recent triple-header provided victory opportunities at all three venues.

He did not want to get too carried away, however, emphasising that Red Bull has now completed its major upgrade programme for the year and that any further improvements from rivals could reshape the running order once again.

Having taken the time to acknowledge the work of the teams of technical director Pierre Waché and Ben Hodgkinson, technical director at Red Bull Powertrains, the question of whether Red Bull is now the team to beat did not draw a denial from the team boss.

“I think what is a fact is that, in these last three races, we had the pace to win, and actually we won two out of the three,” Mekies replied.

“So, for the first time this season, in these three races we had the ultimate pace, and it’s fair to say that the three tracks are different enough for one to think that moving to other types of tracks, the car should be competitive.

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“Now, it’s never a given, and you have seen this with many, many examples this year. You had the back-to-back wins from McLaren, and then they suffered a bit more after.

“You had some very dominant periods from Mercedes, and after that, been suffering. So, it’s a fight every race weekend to extract everything.

“If we do so, we think we can fight for wins. There is another element, which is that, as it is well-documented, we have completed our update programme for this year, so this pecking order could well very rapidly change if some or many of our competitors bring upgrades.

“Now, don’t get me wrong, it does not mean that we will not continue to push very hard to improve.

“We had said to each other the first win is the target, but the other target is to take all the learning. So, the development programme will not change. We have put our focus to ’27. We think there is still a huge amount of learning in ’26 that we could use in ’27.”

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

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