Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko says the fallout from Sergio Perez’s late crash in the Azerbaijan GP was “like an avalanche” as it also impacted Max Verstappen’s title hopes.
Perez was in contention for a podium when he was involved in a collision with Carlos Sainz that left both cars badly damaged.
The loss of those constructors’ points as well as a two-place bonus for Lando Norris handed the World Championship lead to McLaren.
However the VSC ending to the race also cost Verstappen a shot at the fastest lap bonus point after the Dutchman made a late stop for fresh tyres.
It went instead to Norris, helping him to gain three points on Verstappen in the drivers’ championship.
“I think Sainz made quite an aggressive move,” Marko told me after the race. “It was unnecessary two laps from the end. A lot of damage, we lost a lot of points in the constructors’.
“With the fastest lap we would have lost only one point [to Norris], not three. It was like an avalanche.”
Asked if winning the constructors’ title was now looking difficult he said: “Without the crash damage it wouldn’t have been so bad. But it’s also for all the employees – they all are on a bonus on the constructors’, not on the driver’s championship.”
On the plus side the RB20 performed much better after a revised floor was fast-tracked for Baku, and it was a set-up change that made life difficult for Verstappen.
“You saw it on Checo,” said Marko. “Checo could follow the whole race between one and three seconds. So that’s a positive thing.
“Max was following for two laps, the brakes were overheating, the tyres started graining.
“And that’s the negative thing, that the car is still so on the edge if you do the wrong setup. I mean, it was not dramatically different, but it’s different.
“But nobody thought that the reaction would be like that. I mean, all this jumping, and he couldn’t brake.”
Marko remains positive that the team can have a strong race in Singapore, although a lot of parts were lost in the Perez accident and that could compromise the weekend.
“There’s no need to panic,” he said. “But Checo’s car is heavily damaged, so we will have problems with the parts we have, and the right setup.
“I think it’s now more to make a car for Checo so he can race. So the real potential we will see in Austin.”
Alex Albon admits that his Williams FW46 still has “some problems” despite what he called a “luxurious” result for the team in the Azerbaijan GP.
Albon finished seventh in Baku and his rookie team mate Franco Colapinto was eighth as the team bagged 10 points and jumped its close rivals Alpine for eighth place in the constructors’ championship.
However despite the ostensibly similar nature of the venues Albon is cautious about the car’s potential in Singapore this weekend, noting that the team has items to test on Friday.
“I would say Singapore historically has been maybe the worst track of the year for us,” he said when asked by this writer about his prospects. “A hot track, a lot of tyre overheating problems.
“As good as the car was this weekend, there’s still some problems with it. We’ve got some items we want to test for next week in FP1 and FP2. Hopefully we can come up with a better solution for Singapore.”
Nevertheless Albon agreed that the Baku result was a boost for the team, and a clear sign that recent upgrades are working.
“I think we’re in front of Alpine now, which was the target at the end of the year,” he said. “We were talking before about how difficult P10 and P9 was, so to get a P7 and a P8 is luxurious.
“We’ll take that and, yeah it shows that we’ve made great progress with the upgrade again.
“That’s another points finish. That’s another weekend where we’ve been positively quick, I think, very similar to the Aston Martin in terms of pace. Let’s see next week. But for this weekend, it’s been very strong.”
Albon was the highest placed driver on the Baku grid to start on the hard tyres, and his long first stint saw him mixing it with the leaders after they had pitted, while also holding off fellow hard starter Lando Norris.
“We did a different strategy to pretty much the majority of the grid,” he said. “I don’t think it was the quickest strategy in the end. The reason for that was the amount of time we lost with the top teams in that midfield fight when I think I was getting overtaken by everyone, Oscar, Charles and Checo.
“It was 6-7 seconds of race time that would have put us quite easily in front of Fernando, I think, on a race pace. But that was actually because we were almost too quick.
“We thought they were going to come out in front of us, and I would have carried on on my own race, but actually they came out behind me.”
Regarding his time loss while running with the leaders he added: “I wasn’t trying to race them. I was trying to reduce as much lap time as possible, but it was almost identical to blue flags, because I had worn tyres, and then I was getting all the dirty air.
“I was losing a lot of tyre temperature when I was fighting them. So actually it wasn’t that enjoyable. I was hoping they would pull away a little bit quicker.”
Albon was frustrated that he didn’t get a chance to attack Alonso in the closing laps after the Perez/Sainz collision.
“I would like to have seen, because I just got within DRS as the crash happened,” he said.
“But to be honest with you, it’s not that easy to overtake Fernando obviously, and he was on a lower rear wing, so I don’t think it would be that easy.”
Krack is hoping that “track specific” floors don’t become a trend
Aston Martin team principal Mike Krack hopes that the Silverstone outfit doesn’t get into a routine of experimenting with different AMR24 floors on race weekends in search of a track specific benefit.
In Baku last weekend the team tried different options and eventually decided to go back to an earlier version that worked well at that venue.
Traditionally teams have brought floor upgrades that stay on the car for all types of circuits.
However this year many teams have been swapping back and forth after finding that their latest updates don’t necessarily work as planned.
Krack is wary of getting into a situation of flying multiple versions of the floor around the world in search of what works best at a given venue.
While floors are obviously very light their large size and the volume of the flight cases in which they need to travel means that they are hugely expensive to freight, with a direct impact on a team’s cost cap allowance.
“They are different,” said Krack when asked by this writer about the team’s floor experimentation in Baku.
“Some are better in this area, some are better in that area. And that is what we chose to do that, we tried it.
“And you can even call it circuit specific by now, which is scary, because you have to carry floors around the world, which is not a cheap way to transport.”
Asked if a circuit specific floor choice could become a regular feature he said: “Well, I hope not. You have here a track with this heavy low-speed bias, and then you have tracks where you have basically all speeds, and then you have tracks where there is more high-speed bias.
“And with the way the aerodynamics have evolved, they are so on the limit that for us, and maybe also for some other teams, you always have to consider what is the best for you now. I don’t think that the race winner is doing that at the moment.”
Krack says that there are more updates to come for the AMR24.
“We are were still working on bringing parts going forward,” he said. “These are parts that have been developed already, and we try to bring them when they are finished, as quickly as possible.
“We bring them as quick as we can. If something is finished earlier, we bring it to Singapore, and if not, we bring it later, as they come.”
The team was given a boost by Fernando Alonso’s sixth place in Baku, the Spaniard gaining from the late Sainz/Perez crash after working his way into eighth.
“It was the maximum,” said Krack. “We saw from these fights that were going on you had to be on your toes, and you had to be there, because something could happen anytime.
“Even at the very front with Piastri and Leclerc, with the fights that were going on, we said we need to be we need to have this position, because if something happens, we can capitalise on it. And we managed to.
“To be honest we were quite concerned for the tyres going into the race. Fernando managed them really well, and he still had some juice in them when it mattered at the end, when Albon came with fresh mediums, I was surprised how easy was to hold him off.”
Krack acknowledged that Alonso’s drive would probably go under the radar: “It’s super unfair to be honest, because it will go down like a P6. But if you see yesterday, if you see today, I don’t think that the car was really in that position. So we maximised obviously the good starting position.
“But then you have also to bring it home, because you have quick cars all around you trying. One is undercutting, the other one is staying out. What do you do? And this was really well managed, I think, from the pitwall as well.
“You know what you do in that situation. But then also we attacked. We are hard on tyres, so to bring it home was a fantastic achievement.”
Alonso also benefited from a lower downforce setup than his team mate Lance Stroll.
“It was a choice,” said Krack. “Basically coming here we saw here that you need to have proper speed. We were surprised about the low grip. So I think what happened to us, is what happened to everybody, you had to go up on load because the grip of the track was too low.
“The cars were different. We had a little bit more load on Lance’s car, but he was still having speed. Fernando said in the debrief that he was not feeling vulnerable on the straight at any time. So that was good.”
Toto Wolff expects that Mercedes will have a further floor upgrade at the US GP in Austin as the Brackley Formula 1 team attempts to get to the bottom of its recent struggles.
A new floor was tried in practice at Spa, but then shelved for the race, in which George Russell and Lewis Hamilton were first and second on the road.
The new version was seen again in Zandvoort and Monza, where the team had two difficult weekends.
The old one was then back again for Azerbaijan, and while George Russell finished on the podium, results were inconclusive.
It will be used again this weekend in Singapore, but Wolff say a “new new” version is likely to be seen in Austin, with the three-week break allowing all teams to make and bring fresh parts.
“The track is an outlier,” he said when asked if lessons were learned in Baku. “Nevertheless, it’s not like this was night and day. We still suffered from the same balance performance that we had on the new floor.
“So in Singapore we have the same one. That’s what we shipped over. And we need to race that. But from Austin onwards, we will probably go to a new spec.”
Asked if that was already in preparation or would draw on what was learned in Baku he said: “I think we need to go over the data.
“So you’re going for new, new when the new didn’t work properly, but the old one doesn’t work either. So it’s either old new, or new new. We don’t know yet.”
Wolff admitted that this season’s formbook continues to be impossible to predict.
“You look at the qualifying performances that we had, where we first and second in Silverstone and we were first with Lewis in Spa.
“So there was much more performance in qualifying and in the race. But between those eight cars, it can swing that way, because we’re not talking about tons of time. We’re talking about two or three tenths in either direction, then you have an outlier like Leclerc in Baku or in Monza, where they’ve always been strong.
“So as a matter of fact, this is about who is getting the balance as good as possible, and who is having the tyres in the right window, and what kind of aero concept works well at a given track.
“I will be quite curious to see what happens after Singapore. Ferrari was really strong there last year. So I have no doubt that it’s the third in the row where they can race for the win. Red Bull wasn’t last year. We were doing okay. McLaren was doing okay. So it’s four teams now that are very close.”
Asked about the rest of the season he said: “I think where we’ve traditionally been fast was Barcelona, Silverstone, Spa at times. Austin was a good one for us. Brazil was a good one for us. Not so many good ones left!
“But the pattern in Ferrari is every year the same, whether they are, going for a championship win or not. It’s those five tracks where they are exceptional, and the driver is exceptional.”
Bearman let Hulkenberg past, but then got him at the end….
Oliver Bearman says that going wheel-to-wheel with veteran Lewis Hamilton in only his second Formula 1 start in Baku was “very clean, but hard” racing.
Hamilton got past Bearman in the late stages, and then both men gained places from the Sainz/Perez crash.
They also both passed Bearman’s Haas team mate Nico Hulkenberg immediately after the accident scene, just before the VSC was dispatched.
In taking 10th place Bearman also became the first driver in history to score points for two different teams in his first two races.
“It’s definitely cool,” he said when asked by this writer about the record. “It was a tough race. I wasn’t running in the points until the end, because of the crash in front.
“The car was really fast, and honestly, I was really fast as well. I just lost a lot of time in the first stint, just not driving very fast, just saving the tyres too much.
“And that was not really necessary. I took too much the experience from FP2 into the race.
“But honestly, the track is so different in the race that you can almost forget the long runs in FP2, and start again. I put it down to experience.”
Hamilton caught him at one stage early in the race before dropping back to save his tyres and the closing back up again.
“We were going like that, like a yo-yo, quite a lot,” he said. “I was really pushing hard for some laps to overtake Franco [Colapinto].
“And my tyres were really hot, and it was exactly at that point that he pounced on me, and could overtake me quite easily.
“After that, I needed a few laps, then I caught him back up, and I was almost catching the DRS again. So yeah, it’s annoying that I let him overtake. But a guy like that, you can do little mistakes.”
Asked what it was like to race the seven-times champion Bearman said: “You know when you go on the outside that he’s going to leave you space, which is a nice feeling.
“Like in Turn 1, I knew he wasn’t going to put me in the wall, which is a bit less sure with some other drivers! So that’s a nice feeling. And it was always very clean but hard when I was racing him.”
Regarding his opportunistic late pass of Hulkenberg he said: “It went green again, and I managed to get him, with Lewis. Yeah, it was an overtake. Of course I’m sorry for him – he had a problem – to lose the position, also to Franco, but good to take a point.”
Earlier in the race when Bearman was ahead the team asked its drivers to swap positions, so he allowed Hulkenberg to pass.
“I wanted one more lap to speed up, but they didn’t want that,” he noted. “But that’s fine, I wasn’t fast enough at that point in the race, and I was getting in the way of the strategy at that point.
“Nico was by far the faster car, so it’s really my fault that I wasn’t pushing hard enough. That really compromised my race, the fact that I was too slow in the first stint, because I got myself in some traffic for the second one.”
Williams had a great day in Baku in earning seventh and eighth
Franco Colapinto admits that his Williams Formula 1 team and its boss James Vowles made a “difficult bet” by promoting him to a race seat and ousting Logan Sargeant.
The Argentine driver adds that he hopes that he has been able demonstrate that he deserves to have a seat.
Colapinto impressed the F1 paddock in Baku by not letting an FP1 crash distract him and by subsequently qualifying ninth and finishing eighth at a track he had not previously seen.
He still has a chance to land a Sauber race drive for net year, with the Swiss outfit in no hurry and assessing all its options.
“They showed so much confidence and trust in putting me in a seat,” he said of the Williams decision.
“It was a very difficult bet, and a bet that many people didn’t understand. But I hope I come to be showing what I’m capable of, that I deserve a seat in F1.
“The opportunity that James gave me is helping me to show that. I am just doing a lot of work to try to learn quick I have very little mileage in an F1 car. It’s only two races, and FP1, and a few laps in Abu Dhabi last year.
“But I think with the little mileage I got to be in the points in the second race, is something really positive, and really good.”
Colapinto chased Fernando Alonso at one stage in the Baku race and admitted that holding off Lewis Hamilton really brought home what he has achieved in finding himself battling with multiple World Champions.
“When I started to think a bit of that was when Lewis caught me,” he said. “First, I had to keep him behind for Alex [Albon], because if he catches Alex, we were going to lose some points.
“So I tried to use the tyres again. And then suddenly they woke up. And it was that moment where I started to pull away from Lewis, and having a really, really strong pace again with those tyres that were really old.
“It was a point in the race that made me realise a bit where I was, and that was keeping Lewis behind. A proud moment. He said he was driving very well, but we managed to keep him behind, so it was very nice.”
Colapinto didn’t have an easy Sunday in Baku, spending much of the race managing tyres after he was the first driver to pit and had to do 41 laps to the flag on the hards.
“I found very tough the middle part of the race,” he said. “We were really struggling with the tyres. I managed very well the mediums in the first stint. It was very hot, and the mediums were suffering a lot, but we did a great job on that first stint.
“Then a good pit stop, but the tyres were out of the window completely. I was managing a lot the rears. I was just not sure how much I had to manage, how much I could push.
“And I think it’s part of experience, to be very close to Alonso, but I was not sure how much the tyres were going to last. I still had 25 or 27 laps to go, and I was like, really crazy to attack him now!
“I kept doing a lot of management, which the team was asking me to do. But then whenever anyone started to get close to us we stopped the management, and after Hulkenberg passed me, we started to push.
“And then suddenly the front tyres woke up again, and my front was completely open since the first few laps. My front was fully grained, and I had no grip. And then suddenly they woke up, they switched on again, and I started to get a lot of grip.
“That’s why I finished the race so strong and in very good lap times, keeping Lewis behind and pulling away and making a gap. So it was I think a very strong end to the race.”
Colapinto also praised engineer Gaeten Jago, who in a radio pep talk on the grid reminded him that it would be a long race and that there could be points as a reward.
“He’s been on it in every race, in every session that I’ve been doing,” said Colapinto. “He knows how much help I need at this stage, and how much I need the support from the team, and how much I need someone to be there helping me.
“I don’t know many, many, many things, and it’s really tough to come straight into an F1 weekend and be on it with all these things, but they are helping me to do so. I changed the mode like 25 million times this race in between walls.
“My seat was getting really hot. I was asking if there was a mode to maybe make the seat a bit colder, but there wasn’t! It was a good race, and I am still learning a lot. I’m learning to manage the car better, and just really happy to be improving every session.”
Red Bull is set announce its plans for the second RB/VCARB Formula 1 seat after next weekend’s Singapore GP.
Liam Lawson is widely expected to replace Daniel Ricciardo in 2025, and possibly also for the last few races of this season.
It’s understood from sources that “all options” are being considered and will be discussed in Singapore by the Red Bull and RB management before the final announcement is made.
Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko suggested recently that Lawson will race this season. However he was more circumspect in Baku, telling this writer: “Wait until after Singapore, then we can tell you something.”
Red Bull faced a mid-September option deadline with Lawson, who had to have a future F1 race programme in place or be in a position to walk away from the camp. That option has now been taken up.
There have been clear signs in recent weeks that momentum is building behind the Kiwi, who took part in five races last year when Ricciardo was injured.
Williams talked to Red Bull about using him as a replacement for Logan Sargeant for the last nine races of 2024, but it was made clear that he would be recalled if he was needed. That made no sense for the Grove team, and Franco Colapinto got the nod.
Lawson was also highly regarded as an option for 2025 by the Sauber/Audi camp, which has now turned its attention elsewhere.
He was also drafted in to gain extra 2025 car mileage by driving for both RBR and RB in a recent Pirelli tyre test.
Ricciardo is obviously seen as major asset by RB’s main sponsors Visa and CashApp, and losing him – especially for one or both of the upcoming US races in Austin and Las Vegas – would be a major blow.
However high level sources have suggested that the commercial aspect would not form part of any driver decision.
Asked by this writer in Monza is he was confident that he would do all the remaining races Ricciardo insisted that he just had to perform.
“I say yes,” he replied. “But I’ve been in this now long enough – who knows? I’ve seen a lot.
“I will keep kind of making it about me in the sense that if I’m performing, they won’t find a reason to do anything.
“And ultimately, that’s where I’ll leave it. I know if I perform, then I’m good, so if I focus on myself, then it shouldn’t affect me. And that’s what I’m focusing on.”
Meanwhile Sergio Perez’s longer-term future at RBR continues to come up in paddock conversations, and it is understood to be part of the bigger picture of the discussions, although his strong performance in Baku clearly helped his cause. Lawson is clearly currently on pole to one day replace him.
Along with Lawson Red Bull is also keen to assess F2 star Isack Hadjar, who has the chance to do more FP1 sessions as well as the Abu Dhabi rookie sprint, should it be confirmed.
Fernando Alonso earned a valuable sixth place for his Aston Martin Formula 1 team on an “opportunistic Sunday” in Baku having taking advantage of the late collision between Sergio Perez and Carlos Sainz.
The Spaniard had already put himself in the best of the rest position in eighth behind seven cars from the top four teams, with Lewis Hamilton still catching up having started from the pitlane.
It was Aston’s best result since Alonso finished sixth at Montreal in June.
“Yeah, definitely quite happy,” he said when asked by this writer about his race. “Obviously, on a normal weekend, only ninth and 10th is available for the midfield teams.
“And today, thanks to some action in front of us, sixth was available, and we were there to take it. So yeah, an opportunistic Sunday for us, a lot of points. So happy for the team.”
Alonso was the second driver to change tyres, coming in on lap 11 in response to Franco Colapinto pitting. That left him with a 40-lap stint to the flag on the hards.
“We were flexible today, one or two stops were still working for us,” he said. “So we followed more or less the trend, and whatever the people around us were doing, we copy and mirror the strategy.
“And yeah, it was the good one at the end. We were able to maintain the position with Franco, Alex and Nico at one point. So yeah, a tough race. Obviously, no time to relax, but in a way, well-executed.
“Good pit stops with the strategy, good tyre deg. Maybe not super pace this weekend, but we’re still executing the race well enough to score a lot of points. So happy for the team.”
He added: ”I think very similar to Monza. I think the level of risk and precision that you have to apply in a race like today is outstanding, let’s say, for everybody, all 20 drivers, I think, with a low level of grip.
“I think we were driving close to 100% every lap. So it was very impressive that no safety car, no accident happened in the race. It was no different for us.
“Obviously, Monza, P11, not really any prize from that race, and here a lot of points, so one compensates the other. And this is very typical in F1.”
Alonso opted for a low downforce spec that gave him speed on the straight, and he said it worked out well for him, despite the extra stress put on the tyres by sliding.
“I think we had more deg than we anticipated, and that we would love to, but the top speed was definitely a help today,” he said.
“Some moments that they were close behind I saw in the straight they were not even catching with the DRS, so I was a little bit more relaxed than other races.”
Alonso concedes that Aston still has to find more speed even to compete with the midfield group.
“I think Williams and Haas generally they’ve been quicker the last three events,” he said. “I would say. Kevin [Magnussen] in Monza was outstandingly quick and fast, even with a 10-second penalty he finished in front of us.
“So there are a couple of races that we fall behind, and we want to reverse this, and we want to become the fifth fastest team as soon as possible. So yes, Singapore another opportunity.”
Red Bull has brought a small floor revision for the RB20 to the Azerbaijan GP as the first step of its reaction to a disappointing Italian GP.
Max Verstappen qualified seventh and finished sixth at Monza, complaining about the tricky balance of the car, and calling it a “monster”.
Verstappen said on Thursday that lessons had been learned, while conceding that it would take time for the results to work their way through the system.
The initial floor mod did make it in time for Baku, with the team’s official submission to the FIA noting that there were “changes applied to improve the pressure gradients along the floor to improve the flow locally and downstream in all conditions.”
RBR chief engineer Paul Monaghan noted that the team had “licked our wounds” as it tried to get to the bottom of the issues.
“We’re not going to sit still from his comments or our performance in Monza and do nothing to bring here and hope,” he said when asked by this writer about Verstappen’s comments about lessons being learned.
“There are many ways to address the car’s behaviour from Monza, and it touches all the aspects of the car, not just whether we revise a floor geometry or a wing geometry.
“So it would be naive of us to think that we can just leave it. So we’ve licked our wounds, learned our lessons. The proof in the pudding will be, obviously Sunday, but we’ve tried to bring changes to the car, and make it better.
“And we don’t want to watch Monza again. It wasn’t the most pleasant event for us, so we’d like to improve relative for our position.”
He added: “We’ve got to look at why has the car been better prior to Zandvoort and Monza? Was it us? Was it our opposition? Is it combination of the two?
“I think we have to look upon ourselves, because we can’t influence what our opposition does, and try to make our car better, and that’s what we’re trying to do.
“It’s all about putting together the package that Max can drive, feels confident in. Look at the first few races of the season, ‘Oh, you’re not going to get caught.’
“And here we are in a bit of a fight. So between Max and Checo and the whole team, not just what you see here, the question is can we put together a car that can defend the titles?”
Monaghan indicated that the Baku revision is a first step given the time constraints, and that there’s more to come in Singapore next weekend.
“The lessons are kind of ongoing, and the immediate reaction tends to be at the later races,” he said. “So it’s a testament to everybody that we got it here. A lot of hard work, and that hard work will continue. Singapore’s only a week away.
“So it that will be potentially another evolution for us. The scale of the update kind of determines the phase lag in there.
“So if we’ve managed to do it for this race, it’s not the biggest one we’ll ever undertake in terms of geometry change. It’s subtle. Could the effect be good? Yes. And I think the proof in the pudding will be on Sunday afternoon.”
The unusual three week gap after Singapore gives the team time to make bigger changes to Austin, but Monaghan conceded that the sprint format means it won’t be the deail place to introduce updates.
“It gives us the freedom to potentially do more,” he said of the gap. “The disciplined approach is to say is it valuable enough to spend the money to do it, to take it to Austin?
“And don’t forget, Austin’s a sprint race, so you’re going to roll the dice in P1 and then, okay, yes, no, indifferent? Keep it, not keep it?
“But that then leaves us potentially with few of any one piece. So your choices for Austin are team dependent, and somewhat confidence dependent.”
Oliver Oakes admits that he’s still learning about Alpine
New Alpine Formula 1 boss Oliver Oakes sees his role as someone “who takes the bullet for the team” and gives the Enstone staff support and direction.
Oakes was named during the summer break as the new team principal after the departure of Bruno Famin, working under the overall direction of Flavio Briatore.
He says he arrived knowing that he would need time to learn about the operation and determine what can be done better.
“I didn’t come in with any preconceived ideas in terms of what I thought about the team,” he said. “Because at the end of the day, until you’re in somewhere, you don’t know the people closely.
“You don’t know what they’ve gone through. You read about it, and I’ve known certain members of the team, and had some snippets. But I didn’t come in with any preconceived ideas.
“I think you come with your own ethos and approach in terms of how you feel you need to build that trust, that unity and stability back in the team. But I think that’s sort of who you are as a person.
“That’s not because of actually the specific team. For me, I think I know pretty well some of the stories that have gone on at Enstone, sort of the long statements made, and I knew how that had a sort of adverse effect in different ways.
“So the main thing I came with, really, was a sort of clean sheet of paper of, right, where are we at now? What things have we done right? What haven’t we done right?
“And actually, you also want to listen a bit as well to some of that, because you need to get to the bottom of it. It’s never as simple as you know one person, one mistake. There’s always loads of things that have gone into it.”
Oakes insisted that there is now “a clear vision” of the direction to take.
“It’s a pretty special place, Enstone,” he noted. “I keep saying it, but there is a lot of knowledge there, it’s been in F1 a long, long time, as Flavio keeps reminding me daily!
“But because of that the place knows what it’s doing, it just genuinely needs some leadership, and it needs support.
“I’m going to say this because it’s on my shoulders, but I think it’s actually got a clear vision now and clear leadership with me and Flavio there. We’re committed, and as he does keep saying as well, I got the job because I live down the road!
“I enjoy being there, and it does require full commitment from those who are running it, and I think the place probably hasn’t had that for a couple of years.
“And I think that’s the biggest thing I wanted to bring, really, that there’s someone there who takes the bullet for the team, gives them the support and the direction they need.
“That was my only real sort of vision before starting. I actually felt it needed that. It needed someone there who was a racer, who understood what everybody was going through. I’ve just got to deliver, haven’t I?”
The biggest uncertainty in the camp concerns the 2026 power unit, with the Renault project in Viry to be abandoned in favour of a Mercedes customer supply, although the arrangement has not be formally confirmed.
“There’s obviously certain sensitive topics at the moment!,” said Oakes. “I think they’ve been spoken about a lot. I think what hasn’t been spoken about much is about what we plan to do at Enstone, by the same sort of token, really.
“Viry is undergoing a bit of an assessment of the project. And the same things going on at Enstone. We need to understand, actually, where we are good, where we need to improve, and also what changes need to be made as a small sort of evolution and step forward, particularly as we are coming into that transition now, with ’26 on the horizon. It’s a pretty big time in F1 at the moment.
“And I think, from my point of view, it’s quite fortunate to have landed straight after the shutdown that I think I’ve got a bit of time to influence the direction we’re going in, and make sure what happened the beginning of the year, and sort of decisions that were made last summer that caused that problem that we try to mitigate that.
“Because at the end of the day, this team hasn’t forgotten how to build a good race car and to go racing. It’s done that through every cycle of regulations, which is pretty impressive, really.”
Oakes stressed that the updates introduced at Spa paid off with a strong seventh place for Pierre Gasly at Zandvoort,
“I think was quite a good uplift for us, particularly made me look good being in the points on my first weekend!,” he said.
“But I think that was very, very positive, particularly from where the team started the beginning of the season. Full credit to them for that.
“We plan between now and the end of the year to bring a couple more [updates]. We definitely will bring a little bit more performance between now and the end of the year.
“At the end of the day, we want to continue I’d say that sort of recovery from the beginning of the year.”
Adam Cooper F1 