Red Bull Chief Fired Dig at McLaren in Unheard Max Verstappen Radio Message

Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies took a dig at McLaren over team radio following the Qatar Grand Prix.

Max Verstappen cut his gap to Lando Norris down to 14 points with victory in Qatar, after capitalising on a major strategy blunder from McLaren.

The Papaya duo were the only two cars who didn't stop under the lap seven safety car essentially handing Verstappen the victory, with Piastri recovering to second, and Norris fourth.

Qatar's result means all three contenders can still emerge as world champion in Abu Dhabi with Norris only needing to make the podium to secure the title.

Following the race, Martin Brundle described Piastri as a 'broken' man having dominated the entire weekend and lost victory through no fault of his own.

“Piastri was broken," Brundle said.

“I was trying to get some words out of Oscar after the race. He was broken, because he’s dominated this weekend.”

Red Bull's Laurent Mekies in Qatar (credit: getty)

Laurent Mekies fires dig at McLaren in unheard radio

Piastri's frustration didn't stop Red Bull making light of the situation, with F1's team radio breakdown revealing a previously unheard dig from the team principal.

Following the chequered flag, he told Verstappen: “Well done Max, what to say? Never a foot wrong,” he said.

“Magic race. Let the other guys do the mistakes. Well done mate.”

Mekies comments come after Verstappen admitted his title hopes are completely reliant on McLaren's failures.

"We are in this fight still because of other people's failures," he stated via F1.

"Yes, we did really well, we really maximised pretty much all races. But if we would have been in the position of how dominant a car [McLaren] had, let's say that, the championship would have been over a long time ago."

Following Verstappen's damning comments, Norris hit back at the reigning world champion's 'nonsense' comments.

"Max generally has a good clue about a lot of things but there’s also a lot of things he doesn’t have much of a clue about. It’s also Red Bull’s way of going about things, this kind of aggressive nature and, yeah, just talking nonsense a lot of the time," Norris claimed ahead of his P4 finish in Qatar.