Red Bull never believed it wouldn’t be fighting near the front of the grid in Australia, despite a “horrible” pre-season, according to team principal Christian Horner.
Early predictions, although rarely accurate, had Red Bull fighting in the lower midfield due to power unit, cooling and reliability troubles during all three pre-season tests.
Horner though says it was never the case that they’d be slow, there was just a question mark over making it to the end of the race.
“We’ve never believed that we won’t be [near the front] and we will keep fighting as hard as we can to fight ourselves back into competitiveness,” said the Briton.
“We know we have got the basis of a good car, but we know we have got issues to sort out,” he added. “We just have to work hard to get on top of them quickly, together with the guys from Renault. We are doing our best to support them.
“[Melbourne] was the best opportunity that we have really had to work on the car with set-up and the first opportunity to drive the car properly.”
Horner is confident they will get on top of their troubles and says there is no reason why they can’t repeat the 2012 season when they struggled in the opening races, before dominating the second half.
“It has been a horrible pre-season for us, but if anybody is capable of making up ground quickly then we have demonstrated in the past that we are able to do that.
“We had a difficult start to 2012 season after a big regulation change through exhaust blowing and we recovered well from that.”
