Prime Tire Newsletter | This is The Athletic’s F1 newsletter. Sign up here to receive Prime Tire directly in your inbox twice a week during the season and weekly in the offseason.Welcome back to Prime Tire, where today I’m in a reflective mood, thinking about how this is only Formula 1’s second weekend off in eight weeks. Two races to go until the August summer break.And by this time next week, we’ll be back in action at the Belgian Grand Prix.I’m Alex, and Madeline Coleman will be along later.Red Bull Problems: Issues facing boss Mekies 1 year inAs we covered in Tuesday’s PT, ex-Red Bull team boss Christian Horner made his return to the F1 paddock for the first time since his axing last year. Inevitably, the camera crew of the Netflix docuseries “Drive to Survive” was on hand to capture the moment.Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of Horner being forced to step down from the team he ran for more than 20 years, and his exit was made official in September 2025. In the intervening time, Horner and Red Bull agreed to a mammoth settlement figure over his termination.Well …Horner may be plotting a comeback with Aston Martin or Alpine, or being headhunted to run a new entry from Chinese manufacturer BYD — depending on which reports you believe.But no deal is done or official yet. On the BYD reports, I do find it fascinating that FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem went out of his way in what was ostensibly a roundtable interview on the World Endurance Championship (which I attended at Le Mans last month) to insist F1’s next team will be “from China, hopefully.” (More on the WEC later.)Anyway, there is plenty more to consider about Red Bull right now, one year into its time being led by an “engineer with a heart,” Laurent Mekies. Especially as senior staff continue to leave under him, and Red Bull’s version of the Ferrari-pioneered flipped rear wing concept keeps causing star driver Max Verstappen to crash.And it’s fair to say Verstappen is particularly unhappy about that.One way in which Red Bull both has and hasn’t changed since Horner’s exit concerns the pantomime villain character he and, by extension, his team played when it came to F1’s ever-present paddock politics.Mekies certainly gets involved in the politics less frequently, but it’s worth remembering how he kept undermining McLaren’s statements about Gianpiero Lambiase switching sides for 2028. And that Red Bull and McLaren somehow got in a spat about tape late in the 2025 campaign.Elsewhere, there has been notably less focus on how Red Bull’s junior drivers are performing, with Horner gone and his old sparring partner, Helmut Marko, also leaving the team at the end of 2025.