Christian Horner reacts to Sergio Perez’s car being on the crane in F1 Monaco GP, as Frederic Vasseur jokes about it.
After Mercedes’ Toto Wolff termed it as Cirque du Soleil when the marshals lifted Lewis Hamilton’s car at the end of FP3, Red Bull had their own car lifted by the crane during Q1 in qualifying which gave a bright view of the floor of the dominant RB19.
Having already had a look at the Ferrari’s floor on Friday after Carlos Sainz’s crash, Saturday gave a chance to get a look at Mercedes’ and Red Bull’s floor where the latter is the key one considering the dominance it has shown in F1 2023 so far.
Horner joked about rivals getting a peak under the skirt, but he was not too disturbed with that considering that the rivals already get the pictures from spy photographers all around the circuit. “It’s very rude to look up people’s skirts really,” he said.
“Pictures of floors get taken in and around the paddock. They arrive in vans, they work with the cars and the shutters are up and so on, and each team will e employing spy photographers to get pictures of the cars when they’re in parts and pieces.
“That’s common practice, so I wouldn’t have thought it was the first time a picture of the floor has – it was probably the first time it has been suspended from a crane, but all teams are always striving for that intelligence,” summed up Horner.
Unlike Wolff being slightly serious, Ferrari’s Vasseur mostly concurred with Horner, but added a bit of joke about the situation. “We don’t need to have a look [at Red Bull], we have photographers,” he said. “Anyway we have the pictures.”
As noted, the Red Bull car is talk of the town at the moment and Mercedes had some influences of the RB19 on its almost ‘b-spec’ car in Monaco. Having run no zero sidepod for much of this generation of cars, they finally had a beefed up sidepod.
It was certainly flattering for Horner and co, but he is not too much fussed about rivals copying or taking influences. “It’s flattery really,” he said. “You [media and fans] pay much more attention to what they’re doing than I do. We’re focused on our job and what we’re doing and others, if they choose to copy or not, that’s part of Formula 1.”
Here’s Toto Wolff on Lewis Hamilton’s car being craned
Here’s Christian Horner, Toto Wolff on Monaco
Here’s Max Verstappen, Christian Horner on their strategy
Here’s Frederic Vasseur on strategy mistake
Here’s Esteban Ocon on hit from Carlos Sainz