Christian Horner believes that his Red Bull team has now “understood” their earlier reliability issues which arguably cost them three surefire podium places, in Bahrain and Australia, already this season.
Red Bull currently sit in P2 in the constructor’s championship, on 113 points to Ferrari’s 124 points, after Max Verstappen dominated the Emilia Romagna GP weekend. The Dutchman taking pole position, winning the Sprint and leading home a commanding 1-2 in Sunday’s race in front of the dissatisfied Tifosi.
Horner explains how everything turned out right for Verstappen and teammate Sergio Perez after both were in positions to manage their own pace and others’ around them to their liking, when asked what the key was to beating Ferrari in Imola. He had previously admitted that the Imola weekend was a very important weekend for the team to try and bounce back.
“I think, as we saw in Melbourne, the tyres, there’s an operating window,” Horner said. “With Imola, the setup this weekend, we got it right. And we could see that Charles was struggling a little bit more with the front tyres here than we were, both in [the Sprint] and it was starting to happen in the latter part of Sunday’s race.
“So that just gave us, you know, the upper hand, and I think Max was able to manage the race perfectly. Checo was able to build a gap to Charles and manage that gap. And at no point other than one trip across the grass with Sergio did we really come under too much pressure,” summed up Horner.
Hugely costly reliability issues plagued the Milton Keynes-based outfit, most notably in Bahrain where both Verstappen’s and Perez’s car experienced a fuel flow failure in the closing laps, causing a ‘catastrophic’ double DNF from P2 and P4 in the first race of the year.
Verstappen subsequently suffered from a second shock retirement, this time in Australia, caused by a fuel leak while again running in P2 to race leader Charles Leclerc. Horner was asked whether the reliability concerns have been put to bed by the Honda and Red Bull Powertrains engineers back at base, and whether both the issue in Bahrain, and the one which ended Verstappen’s Australian Grand Prix, have been thoroughly understood.
“Ask me in Abu Dhabi,” Horner joked. “You know, it was a great response, both in the factory in Milton Keynes and [by Honda] in Japan, you know, and the best possible response was to come and achieve the maximum score, bar one point, across the two days of racing, so a great fight back and I’m very proud of the whole team.
“I think we’ve understood those issues, or the issue that we had in Australia, which was different to the issue that we had in Bahrain, but you can never say never but I think obviously [the Imola weekend has] demonstrated that we’ve managed to get on top of the issue from Australia,” summed up Horner.
On a weekend where both Ferrari’s crashed in the Grand Prix, Red Bull capitalised in exactly the way they would have been hoping for in order to stop Leclerc, and the Scuderia, from running away with both championships. Their successful weekend in Italy ended the team’s 1-2 finish drought which stretches all the way back to 2016.
Here’s Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez talks of how 1-2 finish
Here’s Max Verstappen winning Laureus award
