Palmer: Red Bull Racing should support Max.

      The Belgian round of the season will be Laurent Mekis's first experience leading Red Bull Racing, and of course, everyone will be watching his work and the team's performance with interest.

      Jolyon Palmer, a former Formula 1 driver and now an expert for the official championship website, shared his opinion while participating in the latest episode of the F1 Nation podcast.

      Jolyon Palmer: "I can imagine that the Belgian press will create a real stampede, rushing towards Mekis, with maximum interest, and his first weekend in this role will be truly tense. Now he has moved to a team that has been a world champion, but Racing Bulls is very different from that — the work is organized differently, and expectations are lower.

      However, I still believe that Red Bull Racing has everything needed to confidently handle this weekend. They have a very strong and experienced racing crew that knows how to operate at a Grand Prix. They have Max Verstappen — a driver who can deliver very high results despite circumstances. Furthermore, he always performs quite well at Spa.

      In Laurent's place, during his first weekend with this team, I would try to gather as much information as possible, as he is about to face a completely new experience. The Belgian round includes a sprint, so it’s important to quickly achieve good car performance and hope that the team succeeds, and Max will handle his task well.

      It seems to me that the team will support Laurent after all the events of the past one and a half years and the loss of several leading specialists. The atmosphere in the team was very unstable, but now everyone remaining at Red Bull Racing — all of these people are true masters of their craft — have a chance to prove themselves again, and to do so, they need to support the new leader.

      Ideally, changes in the team’s leadership shouldn’t severely affect its competitiveness, since the team boss isn’t the one driving the car or developing and executing tactical plans. All of that is done by the drivers and race crew specialists, who are quite capable of performing at a very high level this weekend.

      Right now, the most important thing is to establish mutual understanding and effective information exchange between the team and Laurent, so he can quickly get fully involved in work, assess the situation, and figure out what needs to be changed. It’s possible that with a new leader, the team’s attitude will become somewhat more pragmatic, and it’s not certain that its character will remain the same as it was under Horner. But we’ll see — after all, we don’t yet know how Mekis will perform in his new role…

      At Racing Bulls, he worked with Yuki Tsunoda, and it can be said that Laurent’s psychology is that of someone eager to reach a higher level, so I think he will try to help Yuki.

      Mekis will try to encourage the Japanese driver, remind him of his excellent performances during their collaboration, and attempt to understand why there’s such a large gap between Red Bull Racing’s second driver and Max. Overall, we’ll see whether he can succeed in this task…"