Red Bull Team Principal Christian Horner was full of praise for his team regarding the way they turned the car around in Saudi Arabia, from off the pace on Friday to in the mix for the win on Sunday.
Max Verstappen started on pole in Jeddah and led the first stint, but dropped behind Oscar Piastri’s McLaren after serving a five-second time penalty for going off track and gaining an advantage when fighting the Australian on the first lap.
He came home second, just 2.8s behind the race winner, having closed the gap in the last handful of laps. It keeps Verstappen in touch in the Drivers’ Championship, but more importantly after a lacklustre weekend in Bahrain, it shows Red Bull are in the battle at the front of the field.
“Let’s focus on the positives,” Horner said afterwards. «We finished second, and we had the pace – which on Friday, it looked like McLaren had got 1.2s on the whole field.
Horner believes Red Bull had the pace to win in Saudi Arabia
“We’ll take encouragement from this race that on both the medium and hard tyres, I’m sure the analysis will show that we were quicker than them.”
Free air was a crucial component of the race in Saudi Arabia, something that cost Verstappen in the second stint when he was behind Piastri. The fact he was able to close at the end despite having arguably worked his tyres harder did indicate that Red Bull were at the very least on the pace of the McLaren.
READ MORE: Brown and Horner share contrasting views on Verstappen’s penalty in Saudi Arabia
“I think the engineering team have done a good job in giving [Verstappen] a car that, by the time we got to Qualifying and the race, that was probably our most competitive in a race this year to date,» Horner continued.
“In terms of pace, we were able to pull away from the McLaren. We’re closing them down here, so I think we will take some encouragement out of that. We’re only 12 points behind the new leader in Oscar, we’re two points behind Lando.
Verstappen had to be content with P2 behind Piastri in Jeddah
“Of course, everybody is super-disappointed in the outcome of the race today. It felt like a race that we had McLaren beat but it is what it is. Congrats to Oscar and we’ll take the positives out of the weekend and focus on Miami.”
Fred Vasseur has called for consistency from his Ferrari team, and that is something Red Bull could seem to do with as well. They were not on the pace in China or Bahrain, yet fast in Japan and Jeddah. But do they understand why the RB21 is proving to have some track-specific issues?
“Bahrain was the outlier where we were out of a window, and we know there are areas of the car that we need to improve and we’re working very hard to address some of those,” Horner said.
Up next for the team is Miami, which should be another warm race – but it seems to be in the heat that title rivals’ McLaren excel.
«Certainly their pace in the heat on Friday was insane… [But] whatever they did on Friday, they couldn’t replicate in the race,» concluded Horner.
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