Red Bull ready to ‘pay the price’ as Laurent Mekies counters McLaren’s 2026 caution

Laurent Mekies says Red Bull is prepared to “pay the price” for its late-season developments on the RB21, as the 2026 regulations come into effect in just a few weeks.

While McLaren believes its 2026 preparations would be “heavily compromised” with 2025 development this late in the season, Red Bull boss Laurent Mekies has said the cost is one his team is willing to bear.

Laurent Mekies: Red Bull development approach a ‘net gain’

With the revolutionary new regulations just a few weeks from taking effect, consigning the current cars to the metaphorical scrapheap, Red Bull has been continuously rolling out small revisions and tweaks to its RB21, which has corresponded with an ever-strengthening championship challenge for Max Verstappen.

McLaren, whose MCL39 dominated the first half of the season, has seen its performance relative to Red Bull ebb somewhat, meaning Verstappen has slashed his deficit in the Drivers’ Championship from over 100 points down to just 36 points with four race weekends remaining.

Further small updates could well be on the way, with chief engineer Paul Monaghan revealing that development may not yet be fully switched off, despite the team’s 2026 challenger being just a few weeks away.

With McLaren having switched off development in order to concentrate on the low-hanging fruit of 2026, Red Bull’s continued push may have some negative effect on the immediate competitiveness of the RB22 at the start of the new rules cycle, but Mekies has said this is acceptable.

“We are doing it this way because we think, for us, let alone the other guys, it’s a net gain,” he told the media, including PlanetF1.com, after the Mexico City Grand Prix.

“We validate our approaches.

“For 2026, if we thought it would compromise it, we would not be doing it.

“We know there is a price to pay, we think it’s reasonable, and we think it’s worth it.”

Short of winning the title, there remains precious little reward for continuing with development of the 2025 cars with so few races left at which to reap any benefit, but Mekies has previously said there is a bigger picture at play that means it makes sense for Red Bull to keep up its push.

“Of course, it comes at a cost, undoubtedly, to the ’26 project,” he said.

“But we feel it’s the right trade-off for us, without judging what the other guys are doing.”

The trade-off, in his eyes, is that Red Bull is gaining validation of its understanding of the correlation between its simulated data from CFD and the wind tunnel with the real world; this has been a weak area for the Milton Keynes-based squad in recent years.

“From a Red Bull perspective, and without looking at the other guys around, I think it was, and is, very important that we get to understand if the project has more performance,” Mekies said in Singapore.

“It’s important that we get to the bottom of it, because we will elaborate on next year’s project, even if the regulations are completely different, with the same tools, with the same methodology.

“It’s very important that we validate, with this year’s car, that our way of looking at the data is correct, our way of developing the car is correct, that produces that level of performance – that will give us confidence in the winter for next year’s car.”

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What is McLaren’s position on late development?

Red Bull’s ongoing push may yet reward the team with a Drivers’ Championship title, if Verstappen does prove able to overcome the points tallies of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, but McLaren has made its position clear that, despite Verstappen’s relentless gains, there will be no further updates to the MCL39 in a bid to stave him off.

Development this late in the game, team boss Andrea Stella claims, will prove detrimental to a team in the 2026 rules changeover.

“The 2026 project would be heavily compromised,” he said in Mexico.

“We want to win championships in the future. To win a championship in the future, you need to have a competitive car.

“I think we have been very considerate in the timing of switching our full resources to 2026.”

Added to that, Stella said, McLaren had little room for improvement in a formula that has reached aerodynamic maturity.

“Our car, from an aerodynamic point of view, was already quite mature,” he said.

“To add one point of aerodynamic efficiency, like we have added more than one point when we upgraded our car around Austria, Canada and so on, it takes weeks for us to add one point of aerodynamic efficiency because we were at a plateau in our aerodynamic development.

“In the 2026 car, every week, we add a lot of downforce. So that’s where, with the best information you have available, you have to make a call.

“We also don’t have to forget that, by being the champions, we are the most restricted by the regulations in terms of the wind tunnel allowance and the CFD allowance. So it’s not like we have an unlimited amount of resources that we can use.

“So we need to be on the rate in the way we allocate resources this year to next year, because it comes from the same point when it comes to CFD and aerodynamic wind tunnel testing.

“Like I said before, because we were so much in the diminishing returns, we needed to be realistic and shift our attention to 2026.

“Also, I think that, when we look at Red Bull and when we consider some of the complaints they had at the start of the season, perhaps they had more margin to develop efficiently focusing on 2025 and perhaps they are happier to give up a little bit of the 2026 because they might have some other issues for 2026 whereby they say, ‘Let’s focus on ’25.’”

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