Laurent Mekies refuses to take the credit for Red Bull's ongoing revival.

While Christian Horner's sacking dominated the headlines, the team which he ran over two decades has enjoyed a remarkable turnaround.

In just a few races Max Verstappen, who had previously been written-off in terms of the title, has enjoyed a run of strong results including back to back wins in Italy and Azerbaijan. Even, though to a much lesser extent, Yuki Tsunoda has got in on the act, scoring points at Zandvoort and again in Baku.

Though the team is clearly benefitting from its ongoing development programme, not least the revised floor introduced at Monza, many have cited the appointment of Laurent Mekies as the driving force behind the team's turnaround.

"It's still zero, guys. It's still zero," Mekies told reporters in Singapore when asked about his impact on the team. "And I say it with the same seriousness that I told you after Monza.

"The improvement in performance is very basically due to the work of everyone trying to analyse the limitations of the car, race after race," he added. "What is stopping us from exploiting the potential of the car? How can we add performance to the car? Where do we need to add performance for it to convert into lap time?

"And that work, again, with extremely strong and clear inputs from Max, that work is paying off, which is good news. Because as a group, it just confirms that we have the best people that we can dream of. And we will continue working, we are not stopping there. We will take it again race by race and try to see if there is more to come."

Verstappen believes that it is Mekies engineering background that is paying off.

"I think Laurent is probably being too nice in that sense," said the Dutchman when told of the Frenchman's claim. "But at the end of the day, what is very good is that we just approach it as a proper team effort.

"We always tried to look into the details," he continued. "We tried to understand what our weaknesses were. And since a few races, it's definitely picked up a lot.

"Maybe now it was not as good as last race weekend," he admitted of the Singapore event, "but sometimes you come out of a race just a bit lost, not really understanding why or how. I do think that now we understand why or how we can be better. And, yeah, by asking the right questions, including Laurent being involved in that, it's just working well."

Interesting to note that Ferrari is third in the standings with 298 points while Red Bull has 290, of which Verstappen has scored 273.