Brown backs Mekies to make things work at Red Bull amid key departures

Speaking to a select group of media, including GPblog, the American said he does not believe Red Bull will fall out of F1's front-running teams. He also believes that teams such as Audi are making strides.

Brown began: "I think it would be very foolish to write Red Bull off. I also think Audi's done a very good job, so I think it would be foolish to not think the other teams are going to move up the grid quickly. I think things are only going to consolidate over time, not widen. And we see how quickly the sport can change and how people quickly can get competitive and then sometimes not."

The McLaren CEO sees some work ahead of Red Bull team boss Mekies, but believes he is capable of taking on that challenge. He continued: "I think they have to kind of do a little bit of a reset, right? They lost a lot of people, Christian [Horner], [Jonathan] Wheatley, GP eventually, [Adrian] Newey. So I think it's similar to what I came into, which was a different situation because they were very competitive, but the majority of their pit walls changed.

"I rate Laurent. I think he does a very good job. He's technical, he's young, and I think he's got to rebuild the people that he lost and rebuild the team. And I have no doubt he will. And much like McLaren had a immense amount of talent that just needed to be unlocked, I think that's probably the same as Red Bull, they've been very dominant up to not very long ago. So there's a lot of talent in there and I think he'll just need to get it redirected," he concluded.