Christian Horner has praised lead driver Max Verstappen for his role in trying to help Red Bull Racing out of their current troubles.
The Dutch driver has seen his lead in the Drivers’ World Championship reduced to 62 points following the Italian Grand Prix, on a weekend where they were clearly only the fourth quickest team, finishing P6 and P8 on Sunday. They got extremely lucky that Lando Norris only took 8 points out of his lead.
In the Constructors’ Championship, Red Bull looks set to lose top spot in Azerbaijan. They have a very narrow 8-point gap to McLaren presently.
Verstappen, Horner and Pérez all opened up post-race about the balance difficulties facing the team with the RB20 at the moment.
The 61-time race winner is not one to hide his frustration, whether that has been his radio rants in Hungary, hitting his steering wheel a couple of times, and giving no filter answers to the media when asked about the extraordinary drop in performance over the last 5 months.
Asked about what he needs to do to keep Verstappen happy, Horner says the three-time defending World Champion has been working hard and trying to help away from the car as they look to fix their package and save their championship hopes.
“What’s really impressed me with Max is how he’s really engaged in this process, he’s not panicking, he’s working with the engineers, he’s explaining very clearly where the issues are, he’s putting the time and effort in.
“He was in early this morning, he was on Zoom calls last week, he’ll be on the simulator before the next race, and he’s really working hard at this.
“I think he’s shown great maturity as a World Champion with the way he’s working with the engineering group.
“Nobody likes the situation we’re in at the moment, nobody’s happy with it and we’ve got to work really hard to turn it around.
“But the one thing this team has is strength and depth and talent, and we’ll come back.”
On Saturday, Verstappen outqualified Pérez by only 0.060s as he lost all balance on his new tyre runs in Q3.
In Q2, he did a 1:19.662 on a used set of softs, going P2. However, a 1:20.002 in Q3 saw the Dutchman only get P7 on the grid, a spot and ahead of the Mexican.
Come race day, Pérez closely followed his teammate through the first two stints, although Verstappen ultimately finished 13s and two spots ahead.
The close gap between the pair shows how difficult it is for even one of F1’s best drivers to hustle lap time out of a car that is so out of balance and difficult to drive, says Horner.
“I think that on a low downforce circuit and this type of circuit in particular, it’s highlighted that even Max with his talent wasn’t able to [make a difference].
“You could see flashes of it, like in Q2. As soon as he got a bit of a balance, bang, a lap time was there.
“Theoretically, putting new tyres on should always be quicker than old tyres, and we went 4 tenths slower.”
Horner is fully aware of how dire the current situation is. Red Bull faces a race against time to improve the car to save themselves in both championships.
“Based on today’s performance you’d say both [championships] are under absolute pressure, we were the fourth fastest car today and that’s the reality, we’ve got to turn it around.
“If we want to make sure we win both titles we’ve got to put the performance on the car.”
