Racing
© Morio
Red Bull has left open the possibility of abandoning its Miami-introduced “Macarena” rear-wing concept after Max Verstappen’s British Grand Prix ended in a second consecutive high-speed rear-wing failure, with team boss Laurent Mekies saying the team will do “whatever is necessary to be on the safe side.”
Verstappen spun into the gravel at Stowe in the closing laps at Silverstone when the rear wing did not close properly, costing the car downforce on corner entry and forcing his retirement. It came one week after his Austrian Grand Prix qualifying crash, which he described as a separate issue with the same effect.
“Different fault, let's say, but the same outcome,” Verstappen said after the race. “While turning into the corner, the rear wing is not fully attaching and you lose a lot of downforce for that - you just spin off the track.” He called the repeated problem “super dangerous,” adding: “I was lucky in Austria, I was lucky here, but that's why you get really fed up with it.”
Laurent Mekies, Red Bull team principal, said Verstappen was justified in his reaction after being caught out in high-speed corners on back-to-back weekends. “He’s right not to be happy,” Mekies said. “It is very unpleasant for drivers to be let down by the car in the high-speed corners in two consecutive races,” even if the failures came for different reasons.
More importantly for Red Bull, Mekies did not rule out stepping away from the current wing specification if that is what the investigation demands. He said the team has raced the concept since Miami, but it is still “too early in the analysis to establish whether it's an issue with the concept or something else,” and added that “all the options open” remain available.
Mekies said Red Bull understands what happened in Austria, but early analysis indicated Silverstone was “a different type of failure.” He made clear that distinction does not soften the seriousness of the problem. “Whether or not the failure is different doesn't really matter,” he said, because the team will “review the full area to make sure we leave zero chance for that to happen again.”
That shifts the rear wing from a performance question to a safety one. After two failures with the same on-track consequence, Red Bull is now weighing whether any potential gain from the current concept is worth continuing with it before the team is certain “the same thing cannot happen again.”