Red Bull's chief engineer dismissed the idea that the team has taken any deliberate steps to make their cars less comfortable for Sergio Perez, branding such a move as "foolish".
The Mexican has enjoyed a strong season so far, third in the drivers' championship and scoring the points his team needs to see off their Ferrari rivals. But in recent weeks there has been a feeling that all is not well with the 32-year-old, who trails Max Verstappen by 57 points.
Perez was talked about as a title contender after winning the Monaco Grand Prix, but since then things haven't gone his way. He has finished second in two of last four races, but failed to finish the other two due to a mechanical failure and damage sustained from a collision.
And away from the results he has not been happy either, as he feels development of his RB18 is making it more difficult to drive. "I haven't been as comfortable with it as I was in the beginning, let's put it that way," he said prior to the Austrian Grand Pri x.
Asked for his take on that comment, Red Bull chief engineer Paul Monaghan 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 to adopt them. Maybe his set-up has suited a bit more than Checo. 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."
There have been suggestions that the team has been focussed upon upgrades that might benefit Verstappen and his driving style, but Monaghan said that was untrue. "Has the direction taken something that might be preferential to Max? No not really," he added.
