Red Bull dismisses rivals’ ‘games’ as Laurent Mekies denies benchmark tag

Red Bull has called out its rivals for playing a “good game” with Toto Wolff labelling the team the “benchmark”, while James Vowles claimed Red Bull turned down its engine in Bahrain.

But while not specifically addressing his Williams rival’s comment, Red Bull team boss Laurent Mekies said his team isn’t even close – if anything, it is outside the top three: Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren.

Red Bull accuse rivals of ‘games’

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After nine days of running, well, for the majority of the teams, the pre-season action concluded at the Bahrain International Circuit on Friday with Charles Leclerc setting the pace ahead of Kimi Antonelli with Oscar Piastri in P3.

Amid speculation that Mercedes didn’t go for a glory run, as claimed by former F1 driver Jolyon Palmer, Leclerc topped the pre-season times by eight-tenths over the Mercedes driver, with Piastri a further 0.06s back

As for the fastest time by a Red Bull driver, that was Max Verstappen in fifth place, where he was 1.2s down on the pace-setting time.

Rivals, though, have been playing the traditional pre-season games with one another.

After a flying start to the shakedown in Barcelona, where Mercedes’ compression ratio issue flared up, leaving the team facing an e-vote over the method of measurement, Mercedes passed the buck to Red Bull. Claiming the RB22 was the best package, and had better energy deployment than its rivals, Toto Wolff called the Red Bull RB22 the “benchmark”.

Vowles, team principal at the Mercedes-powered Williams team, added his voice as he told F1TV: “There are games being played. Red Bull looked really good until we spoke about their power unit. Then they’ve turned it down quite a bit since then.”

Simply put, no one will know the truth – or even have an indication as to this season’s pecking order – until qualifying in Melbourne.

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Red Bull team boss Mekies has brushed it aside as nothing more than games from rivals, although that’s not to say Red Bull and its new Red Bull-Ford engine is lagging at the back of the field.

“I think there is a good game in the pit lane to try to move the attention onto competition, and our approach is that we try to keep the noise low, to concentrate on ourselves. We have a huge amount of work to do,’ he told PlanetF1.com and other media in Bahrain.

“We are unfortunately not the benchmark.

“We have a very high confidence that we are probably trailing the group of the top guys right now. Nonetheless, it’s fair to say that, yes, probably a fair part of the pit lane was surprised by the fact that we could run with that level of consistency with a completely new project. And again, it’s something that our people back in Milton Keynes should be proud of.

“The competitiveness fight ahead is going to be massive, and it will take us a lot of time to reach the level we want to reach.”

As for who he does think is the benchmark right now, Mekies reckons it is between Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren, but he cannot say which of the three has the edge.

“We see Mercedes being the fastest team right now. It’s a bit of a guessing game,” he said. “I was questioning the guessing game of my colleagues, I’m not going to enter the game myself.

“But, yeah, we think, you know, Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren are probably the guys that are… the three of them a fair bit faster than us right now. Telling you by what amount on which order is probably too difficult, but that will be my guess right now, but the guesses will change.

“We will all evolve our car. We’ll all start to optimise what we have and since to move again. But I will say these three guys are, we think, a fair bit ahead of everyone else.”

Racing Bulls boss Alan Permane also called out the winter testing game that everyone plays.

“Yeah, I think we play this game every winter testing, trying to guess where everyone is,” he said.

“There’s no doubt the power unit is working well. There’s no doubt it’s reliable. We’ve done lots and lots of lots of mileage this morning, we did 400 kilometres just this morning. So fantastic reliability from it.

“I think we need to wait until Saturday afternoon in Melbourne before we make a judgment on who’s where.”

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher and Mat Coch

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