Red Bull team boss Larent Mekies addressed the team’s second seat amid Yuki Tsunoda’s inconsistencies this season.
After two race weekends, Red Bull, under the leadership of Christian Horner, made the drastic move to demote Liam Lawson in favor of Tsunoda — giving the longtime Red Bull junior a chance at the senior team.
Since making the switch, Tsunoda has been outperforming Lawson, but is still a good deal away from Max Verstappen.
The bar is high for any Red Bull driver lining up alongside Verstappen — other than Daniel Ricciardo — no one has managed to compete.
Mekies was the leader of Racing Bulls last season, when Tsunoda was part of the racing team, speaking highly of the Japanese racing star and vouching for him to get a chance at Red Bull.
Horner and the leadership at Red Bull delayed Tsunoda’s promotion until Lawson struggled and the team moved on from Sergio Perez.
Eventually, it came, and while he has not shown drastic improvement over others, he is exhibiting some meaningful progress.
Horner ended up getting fired, and Mekies took over as team principal, leading the team during the Hungarian Grand Prix right before the summer break.
In the lead-up to the Dutch Grand Prix, Mekies opened up about his takeaways from seeing Tsunoda at Red Bull over the past couple of weeks and what the future holds for the second seat in the team.
“You know, the reality for us is that we’re not in any hurry. We’re lucky to have Yuki in the car, we have Racing Bulls, which is working very well, and we can also evaluate our young drivers,” Mekies said to Canal+.
“Yuki took a real step forward in Spa and also in Budapest in terms of gap with Max.
“It wasn’t very noticeable because in Budapest we weren’t competitive overall… So we’ll see: Liam is making a lot of progress at Racing Bulls, Isack has been doing an extraordinary job since the start of the season, and continues to surprise us every race.
“If you look at it from Red Bull’s point of view, it’s hard to see why we would be in a hurry to make this decision.”
With a decision on hold until the end of the season, Red Bull are seemingly waiting to collect all of their four drivers’ results, and then taking a decision.
“We understand the questions and the impatience surrounding this, but for us, it’s all about trying to put our drivers in the best possible position for the rest of the season – Max, Yuki – and seeing where we are in a few months’ time; there are still ten races to go,” the racing executive added.
“Then we’ll make the best possible decision with everyone involved.”
For more F1 news, head on over to Newsweek Sports.
The post Red Bull Evaluating Options for Second Seat, Team Boss Says appeared first on Newsweek.
