Red Bull considers taking Monaco update off the car: "Safe route"

Red Bull Racing may be satisfied with the one-two punch of Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez, but the team has homework to do. Without Charles Leclerc's retirement, it might have been an unthinkable scenario, especially due to Verstappen's DRS problem. However, Helmut Marko believes that the Dutchman could have won even without his rival's DNF.

At the beginning of the race, Verstappen lost some time to Leclerc, but that was a deliberate choice, according to Marko. "We had to drop back initially for temperature reasons because we wanted to save the tyres a bit," the Red Bull Racing advisor said in conversation with ORF.

With that, the team wanted to wait for Leclerc's tires to go, and then strike. "We got the information about the Ferrari's tire condition and it was already much worse than ours at that point. So at race pace with DRS we think we could have caught up," the Austrian observed.

Verstappen didn't get that chance, as a mistake put him behind George Russell and he found out that his DRS was still not working properly. Why that problem occurred and why it was only the case with the Dutchman, Marko explained earlier.

Whether the team can fix the problems within a week for the Monaco Grand Prix remains to be seen, and Marko even suggests that the team might take the weight update off Verstappen's car. "We have to consider taking the safe route. Two kilos more or less will not make the difference in Monte Carlo," the Red Bull chief said.