Red Bull to review Verstappen’s high tyre degradation in Austin

Red Bull will review why Max Verstappen suffered fairly high tyre degradation in the second stint of the United States Grand Prix, Laurent Mekies said. After the race, Verstappen had suggested his soft-soft-medium strategy did not match what had been agreed beforehand.

Mekies said he had not heard Verstappen’s specific comments. He thought the choice of soft tyres for the second stint may have surprised the driver; it was Red Bull’s baseline option, he said.

Verstappen finished third, 17.485 seconds behind race winner Kimi Antonelli. Red Bull ran him on a soft-soft-medium strategy, while Antonelli’s medium-to-hard one-stop was the pace-setting approach.

Mekies did not see tyre choice or strategy as an excuse for the result: he said Antonelli had more pace and that one-stop and two-stop strategies were probably close in race times. Red Bull normally has some advantage over rivals on softer compounds, Mekies said, but struggled to use it. He added that Verstappen suffered fairly high degradation on both soft sets.