Formula 1 · Technical Analysis

Two Crashes, One Wing: Why Red Bull May Shelve Its ‘Macarena’ Concept at Spa

Verstappen calls it “super dangerous.” Mekies won’t rule out reverting. After back-to-back rear wing failures pitched its star driver off at high speed, Red Bull faces a defining call before F1’s fastest stress test.

Two consecutive race weekends, two high-speed crashes, one common component. Max Verstappen’s Austrian Grand Prix qualifying accident and his race-ending trip through the Stowe gravel at Silverstone were, by Red Bull’s own analysis, caused by two different failures — but both traced back to the same part: the “upside-down” active rear wing the team has raced since Miami, its adaptation of the concept Ferrari pioneered and the paddock nicknamed the “Macarena.” Now, with eleven days until Formula 1 arrives at Spa-Francorchamps — the calendar’s most unforgiving high-speed examination — team principal Laurent Mekies is refusing to rule out the most drastic fix available: parking the concept entirely.

Same outcome, different fault — and that’s not reassuring

The mechanics of both incidents follow the same pattern. In 2026’s active aerodynamics era, the rear wing opens into a low-drag straightline mode and must reattach fully as the driver returns to cornering configuration. Twice now on Verstappen’s car, it hasn’t. In Austria, the wing didn’t close properly into the final corner of his last Q3 lap, snapping the car into the barriers. At Silverstone, running third with four laps remaining and hassling George Russell, the wing again failed to fully reattach at the end of a straightline-mode zone into Stowe — and the rear simply let go.

Again, while turning into the corner, the rear wing is not fully attaching. And you lose a lot of downforce for that. It’s super dangerous, because you can really hurt yourself, two times. I was lucky in Austria, I was lucky here, but that’s why you get really fed up with it. — Max Verstappen, Red Bull driver

The detail that makes this worse rather than better: the two failures were different. A single fault can be found and fixed. Two separate ways for the same wing to betray a driver at high speed, discovered in consecutive fortnights, points to something less contained — and Mekies, to his credit, didn’t try to spin it otherwise, conceding that “whether or not the failure is different doesn’t really matter” when the outcome is a driver in the gravel twice.

Why Spa raises the stakes

The timing could hardly be less forgiving. Spa-Francorchamps is the ultimate stress test for exactly this component: long flat-out sections through Eau Rouge-Raidillon and the Kemmel Straight where straightline mode delivers its biggest gains, chained directly into fast, committed corners where a wing that fails to reattach carries the gravest possible consequences. A concept that has now failed twice at high speed arrives at the one circuit where a third failure would be most dangerous — and most visible.

Asked directly whether guaranteeing “zero chance” of a repeat could mean reverting to the conventional rear wing used by every team except Red Bull and Ferrari, Mekies left every door open while defending the concept’s track record.

We will do whatever is necessary to be on the safe side. We have raced this since Miami. There have been a number of races, so it’s too early in the analysis to establish whether it’s an issue with the concept or something else. But we are going for sure to leave no stone unturned, and we have all the options open. — Laurent Mekies, Red Bull Team Principal

A driver running out of patience

The technical question lands on top of an already strained relationship. Verstappen had wanted to start Silverstone from the pit lane with a fresh power unit and revised set-up after his troubled qualifying; the team kept him seventh on the grid with a car he’d predicted would behave exactly as badly as it did. Asked afterwards whether he planned to sit down with Red Bull’s management before Spa, his answer was withering: “To be honest, I don’t want anything to do with it for a while.” With his performance-linked exit clause looming over the August break and his frustration compounding race by race, every technical decision Red Bull makes now carries contractual weight too.

The wider ramifications extend beyond Milton Keynes. Ferrari has developed the upside-down wing concept all season, and McLaren has built its own version awaiting a debut. If Red Bull’s failures prompt the FIA toward tighter scrutiny of the concept itself rather than one team’s execution of it, the fallout would land on three front-running aero programmes simultaneously — in the middle of a title fight. F1 history is not kind to clever aerodynamic ideas once they produce a visible, television-friendly failure.

• Red Bull’s review covers the actuator, locking hardware and control software across the whole system, not just Verstappen’s chassis.
• Ferrari introduced the original ‘Macarena’ wing at Bahrain testing; Red Bull’s version, seen from Miami, opens an even larger gap.
• Verstappen said even an inherited podium at Silverstone would have felt “not deserved at all” given the car’s balance and top-speed deficit.
• The Belgian Grand Prix runs July 17-19 at Spa-Francorchamps.

Whatever Red Bull’s teardown concludes, the decision it produces will say a great deal about the team’s priorities in a bruising season: keep chasing the aerodynamic gains that justified copying Ferrari’s trick in the first place, or hand its increasingly restless star driver the one thing he’s actually asked for — a car that doesn’t let go at 300km/h. At Spa, of all places, there may not be room to have both.