With only less than a week left to the pre-season testing in Bahrain, the F1 community highly anticipates seeing the performance of the new season’s challengers. Particularly, all eyes have been turned to Red Bull’s new car and performance after the team’s renowned design guru Adrian Newey moved to Aston Martin for the 2025 season. Despite having a relatively difficult F1 season in 2024, Red Bull team principal Christian Horner reflected that the team worked hard on identifying the deep-rooted issues with the RB20.
In an interview with Germany’s Auto Motor und Sport released a few weeks ago, the 66-year-old stated that his previous F1 team Red Bull team overlooked his worries about the development of last season’s car RB20. He said that the lack of experience and persistence in going in the same direction resulted in problems with driving the car. The Briton further remarked that though Max Verstappen could cope with the car’s difficulties, his teammate Sergio Perez’s performance dropped and their performance differed highly throughout the season.
Issues are more deep-rooted
At the F1 75 launch event, Horner was asked his thoughts on Newey’s comments which he wasn’t aware of. After learning about the remarks, he responded that the problems were present before the previous season while Newey was still a part of the team as chief technical officer.
“I haven’t seen those comments, but I think the issues are more deep-rooted than just last year.
“I think that they’d actually start… when you really dig into the data and some of the characteristics, you start to see them much earlier than that. Certainly during 2023.”
The team worked hard to solve the problems
Though Newey claimed that the team did not take his concerns into account, Horner argued the opposite. He stated that their team put immense effort into getting to the roots of the problem and catering to the needs of the car over the winter.
“I think that it was a matter of unravelling it to understand what were the contributing factors to having a very peaky performance. That’s where the team have worked very hard to understand that and address it.
“The team have worked very hard over the winter to work on some of the vices of RB20. I think we’ve had a good winter. And, you know, the team has been working incredibly hard.”
Horner says they have managed to address the issues
Christian Horner expressed that while they had already solved some of their car’s problems towards the end of last F1 season, Red Bull took a step forward during the winter. Like all of the F1 community, he also waits season to start to see how far they managed to address their deficiencies.
“We’ll get the first sort of indication next week as to, you know, have we managed to address some of the issues. We managed to improve them during the course of certainly the latter third of last year. And we’ll see if we’ve managed to go a step further over these early races.”
