Mekis: It will be extremely difficult to maintain this level

Laurent Mekies has been leading the team, now called Visa RB, since the beginning of this year, and more new people joined at the end of January. The experienced Alan Permain has taken over as race director, Guillaume Cattelani, formerly of Red Bull Technologies, has become deputy technical director and Tim Goss, former technical director of the FIA, now heads the entire technical department.

While the team from Faenza only had two points after the first seven stages of last year’s season, it now has 20 points at the same stage of the championship and is in 6th place in the constructors’ championship.

“Becoming one of the best teams in the middle of the pack is our medium and long-term goal, but seven races are behind us and we are already there,” said Laurent Mekies in an interview with the championship’s official website. . “We are getting ahead of our own plans as this is not a one-year task, but we are well aware that it will be extremely difficult to maintain this level throughout the season; we will have to make enormous efforts.

We are in 6th place in the Constructors’ Championship, but we have no lead in pace compared to the teams occupying places 7 to 10. But we are effectively upgrading the car and working well on the race weekends, looking to gain momentum with each successive stage of the season. I think we managed to take every opportunity to earn points that we had.

I’ll give just one example: in the Miami stage we earned a lot of points, but that weekend we introduced a series of technical innovations originally planned for Imola. However, we brought two modernized bottoms to Miami, although we had no spare parts at all, so we took a big risk. But everything worked.

Of course Daniel had problems at the start in Imola. Now we need to find out what happened in the first phase of the race and what aspects of the car’s behavior stopped it from showing everything it is capable of. When entering corners, certain features of the car appear, and he does not like it – we have addressed this problem and are already seeing progress. Now we must try to take the next step to modernize the car so that this process continues.

In Yuki’s case, I can say that he can demonstrate his natural speed better, that’s for sure. He understood how he could improve. But he has also become a more mature professional outside the cockpit, which can be seen in the way he communicates with the engineers. Hence the stable results.”

Lorak Mekis also noted the important contribution that specialists like Alan Permain make to the team’s work: “Alan’s influence is already very tangible. He fits the team perfectly and is ready to rebuild, so that we do not try to copy what Ferrari, Alpine, Red Bull or Mercedes do, but through common efforts to find our own effective approach to things.

The challenge is to continue modernizing the machine at an accelerated pace, even though this is the most difficult aspect of our work. We foresee that on this road we will have to overcome certain obstacles, and that in some phases of the season there will be more difficulties, but in other situations we will be able to win back.

Perhaps in the next two races we will have more problems than our rivals, who plan to actively introduce new products. But in two or three stages we will try to make a leap forward.”