Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has made a startling prediction, saying he wouldn’t be surprised if Mercedes were to finish two laps ahead of their rivals.
Whilst some bold predictions have been made by F1 analysts, with some claiming Mercedes could be anywhere between one and two seconds quicker per lap than anyone else, Horner is the first high-level source to suggest a similar performance gap.
“The bottom line is Mercedes have got a bit of a march on people,” he told the Guardian amid suggestions Red Bull left development of the RB10 too late into the 2013 season.
“They invested more, they invested earlier,” he added. “They’ve got themselves into a good position.
“If Mercedes were to finish two laps ahead of the opposition in Melbourne, that wouldn’t be a surprise, based on what we’ve seen in preseason testing.”
Horner also admitted they may have been too aggressive with the cars design, but revealed they are now on top of the cooling issues which plagued their pre-season.
“We aggressively pushed the boundaries on the packaging of the car, as Adrian [Newey] always does, to try and get every bit of aerodynamic advantage.
“We took a step over the line at the first test. We then engineered our way out of that for Bahrain, and cooling now isn’t an issue with the car at all,” he confirmed.
“Adrian’s probably the most competitive person I’ve ever met. For sure, he’s working tremendously hard at the moment. But we can’t control all aspects of the vehicle. Collectively with Renault, I’m confident we’ll get on top of it.”
