Laurent Mekies, principal of the Red Bull team, says the delay in the start of the Belgian Grand Prix surprised the team after choosing to set up a rainy weather for the car.
Max Verstappen won a sprint on Saturday with a drop setup, taking advantage of its top speed in dry conditions. With forecasts for rain on Sunday, Red Bull changed its approach in qualifying based on weather, but 90 minutes passed between the original attempts to start the race and eventually raced on the dry track.
“I think we’re all surprised at how late we’ve made the race,” Mekies said. “I’m sure the FIA had its own considerations, but it certainly surprised us as a team, because basically we were waiting for the rain to stop, as well as the sun came out.
“So, again, the FIA had its own reasons. In certain cases, it certainly takes our performance because it biased the car towards the rain. But that’s part of the game.”
Max Verstappen was limited to Charles Leclerc’s fourth place, so Makies pointed out how difficult it can be to overtake dry and dry throughout the weekend.
“Obviously, the fact that we had very few running wet didn’t help. That’s what we had made a very heavy choice and thought of a wet race. It ended up raining, but we didn’t get a lot of great races (laps).
“It was dry and I don’t think there was much chance of overtaking. At the end of the day, Max spent his second lap in Charles’ gearbox. In dry, I’ve never seen many overtaking moves in this race.
“So, that’s what it is. You start with the fourth, you get beaten by Charles (in the qualifying round) for 3,000th of a second, and finish in the fourth.”
Dry Run also hurt Scorenoda’s chances of scoring points after the Mekies spent the team’s errors on his position in the top 10 and admitted that he couldn’t regain those positions.
“So for Yuki, that was our mistake. We wanted to hold him in the same lap as Max. Everything was ready, the crew was out. We were ready to get all the cars.
