Red Bull not 'foolish' to deliberately design a car that will not suit Sergio Perez, says team's chief engineer

Red Bull chief engineer Paul Monaghan has dismissed suggestions that the team would develop the car in such a way that it suited Max Verstappen more than Sergio Perez.

In races like Monaco and Azerbaijan earlier in the season, Perez was able to compete with Verstappen over a single lap. In the last few races, however, Verstappen has been able to stretch the gap over his teammate while Perez has also alluded to the car's development path going away from him.

Monaghan dismissed such suggestions and explained that in a restricted rules set like the one in place right now, it's difficult to find improvements on the car anyway. He also claimed that the team would take anything it can get instead of wasting resources on finding something specific.

The 54-year-old said:

“I’m not aware that we have made a deliberate step to make the car less to his liking. It’s not easy to make cars go faster, shall we say. And within a fairly constricted set of technical regulations and freedoms, if you find a way to put a bit of pace on, you will often take it if it’s within your financial limitations to apply it.”

“So you then go through a process of your research tools, realisation at full size and then evaluation at full size. And if it looks like we put some pace on the car, typically, we will keep it on the basis of all your tools saying your car will be faster.”

“Now, it may be that in deploying the tools it’s been easier for Max [Verstappen] to adopt them. Maybe his set-up has suited a bit more than Checo [Sergio Perez]. But it’s not as if the car is fixed in terms of its parameters, and that Checo can’t then revise the set-up to say it’s to his liking again.”

“And it would be foolish of us to not then try and give Checo a method to get more out of it. We’re in the race with both titles. And we need both cars ideally ahead of the Ferraris and the Mercedes, so we will do everything we can to put the two of them there.”

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Red Bull's primary challenge is fighting for both titles

Paul Monaghan also reiterated that Red Bull's primary aim is to beat both Mercedes and Ferrari and for that, Sergio Perez getting a strong result is just as important. Claiming that Red Bull's fight is against its competitors and not in giving one driver the edge over the other, he said:

“Max isn’t one to rest on his laurels, and neither is Checo, and neither are we. So our race is within our team. But they’ve got to remember that they both drive in the same team, and then our race is against our neighbours, [Ferrari and Mercedes] who are both quite happy to see us behind them.”

“So our fight is on many fronts. But one of them I wouldn’t regard as a contest, it’s more our challenge. And that’s both our drivers most and we’ll support them as best we can.”

Red Bull currently leads both the championships this season, with the team holding a 56-point advantage over Ferrari and Verstappen holding a 38-point advantage over Charles Leclerc.