Red Bull Formula 1 team principal Laurent Mekies has confirmed that the team has identified two separate mechanical failures behind the alarming rear-wing collapses that sent Max Verstappen crashing at the Austrian and British Grands Prix, with a permanent fix set to debut at this weekend's Hungarian Grand Prix.
The Milton Keynes squad withdrew its innovative Macarena rotating rear-wing concept — a design originally pioneered by Ferrari — after Verstappen suffered two high-speed accidents in the span of three race weekends. The Dutchman's RB22 shed its rear wing at the Red Bull Ring in Austria and again at Silverstone, leading a visibly frustrated Verstappen to describe the component as 'super dangerous.'
Speaking after Sunday's Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, where Verstappen drove an older-specification rear wing to a third-place finish, Mekies revealed that the engineering investigation had isolated the root cause.
'It was mechanical, and it was two different things,' Mekies said. 'So two different mechanical issues. We will have a fix for Budapest.'
Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache elaborated on the findings during the Spa weekend, confirming that both failures stemmed from mechanical flaws in the Macarena wing's design rather than any aerodynamic or structural overload. Wache also stressed that the FIA was satisfied with the overall safety of the design and that the team was now acting out of an abundance of caution.
'We've proved it to them, what we've done,' Wache said. 'I think it's on our side that we make it cautious now. We don't want to take any risk, and we want to be 100% sure.'
The team's cautious approach means the Macarena wing will only return to Verstappen's car once Red Bull is satisfied it is 'bulletproof.'
Verstappen, for his part, offered a dry assessment of the older-spec wing he raced at Spa. 'It performed well. I kept it on the road, which I think is the first thing,' he quipped. 'We were just a little bit more competitive, and the balance was a little bit better. But we struggled more on the hard tyre, as simple as that.'
Looking ahead to the Hungarian Grand Prix at the Hungaroring, Verstappen struck a cautious tone. 'Of course it's nice to be less starved in Hungary, but I don't know whether that's good or bad because, at the end of the day, there are a lot of corners and you need good cornering performance from the car, which makes it impossible to know how good we are going to be.'
The Hungarian Grand Prix takes place this weekend, with Red Bull hoping its Macarena wing fix restores both performance and reliability to its 2026 challenger.
Sources
- https://www.crash.net/f1/news/1101537/1/red-bull-confirms-findings-super-dangerous-wing-max-verstappen-judges-old-design
