Red Bull boss Christian Horner has admitted that McLaren’s dominant Dutch Grand Prix pace has shown it has surpassed the team as the “benchmark” in Formula 1.
McLaren was a class apart at Zandvoort as Lando Norris landed a crushing 22-second win over Max Verstappen despite losing the lead to the Dutchman at the start.
Verstappen capitalised on his rival making a slow start to seize the lead, but was powerless to stop the Briton from surging past on the start-finish straight on Lap 18.
Horner has revealed that Red Bull’s decision to pre-empt higher degradation in the race on its set-up backfired as it ended up spurning too much time on the straights.
“Firstly they [McLaren] were very, very fast today,” Horner told media including Motorsport Week. “All credit to them on that respect.
“We took a little bit of a gamble, because we thought the deg was going to be quite high, and so we went quite a lot on the downforce level to maximum downforce.
“That was a little bit of a gamble, in that if the deg had been higher, we felt it would have helped with the deg.
“As it turned out, the deg was low, very low, and it just made us slow on the straight line with Max.
“So he did the hard part at the start and made a great start, led obviously into the first corner, was able to break the DRS.
“But pretty early on you could see Lando was very comfortable behind him.
“And then obviously passed him pretty easily with a straight line deficit that we had, and the speed that he had.
“And then to be honest with you, his pace thereafter, he was just managing the race. From that point, Max’s objective was, he knew he couldn’t beat Lando today. He couldn’t beat him.
“The most important thing that we discussed before the race, if we can’t beat them, make sure we beat the rest of the field.
“At one point I think we were concerned about Piastri coming up very quickly, passing Russell and then getting onto the back of Leclerc.
“But then he started to run out of pace, and we had that reasonably covered.
“A lot of, I think the benefit that we’ve run today is we’ve run both cars in different specs, so we’ve taken a lot of data out of today.
“But it’s important now that we understand and use that data and the driver feedback. Max is very clear on where he feels the issues are on where we need to improve.”
The Woking-based squad’s MCL38 has been regarded as the best car in recent months and it introduced several new parts this weekend as it aims to topple Red Bull.
With Oscar Piastri also accruing valuable points with fourth place, McLaren has now reduced Red Bull’s advantage down to 30 points with nine rounds still remaining.
“McLaren are setting the benchmark now,” Horner acknowledged. “That’s clear in terms of pace. They’ve been that the last couple of races.
“Certainly in Hungary they were very competitive. Spa it was Mercedes. Here, Lando in particular was very, very strong. Definitely they have the fastest car at the moment.
“We have to respond to that. It’s not rocket science, there’s no silver bullets in this business.
“It’s a matter of understanding the problem, addressing the problem and then implementing fixes to it.”
Asked whether Red Bull is now the underdogs in the championship race, Horner reiterated: “McLaren has been the benchmark car over the last few races.
“We’re very acutely aware that we need to respond to that. Everybody in Milton Keynes is working incredibly hard to address that.”
