Christian Horner has played down his Red Bull teams dominance over their competitors, denying the 2011 season will be a walkover for the outfit.
That comes despite Sebastian Vettel qualifying almost eight tenths ahead of second place man Lewis Hamilton, an ominous result for the McLaren team and more so Ferrari with Fernando Alonso a further six tenths behind the McLaren.
When asked if the season would be a walkover for Red Bull, Horner replied: “I totally doubt that will be the case.
“We know Jenson Button, Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso will be hugely competitive at forthcoming races,” he told the BBC.
The Red Bull team principal is under no illusion that McLaren and Ferrari will make huge performance gains over the next few races, allowing them to challenge the Milton Keynes team.
“We can’t underestimate our rivals,” he added. “Ferrari with the heritage, quality of personnel and resources they have, they will come back strongly with Fernando maybe at the next race.
“And we saw the steps McLaren made from being woefully uncompetitive [during pre-season testing] to being right there with some modifications.”
Red Bull won’t make it easy though, Horner is confident his team can out-develop their rivals to stay ahead.
“It will effectively be an arms race this year in terms of development and getting performance from the car.
“We take nothing for granted, there’s no sense of throttling back because we think we’re competitive – we’re very keen to build on the performance we saw in Melbourne at the weekend.”
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