Red Bull boss Christian Horner has refuted claims from Adrian Newey, who suggested the team’s development issues during the 2024 Formula 1 season showed signs of inexperience.
The Red Bull RB20 was the class of the field when it arrived on the scene at the start of last year with Max Verstappen winning seven of the first 10 races.
Some of those came at a canter, but Lando Norris’ maiden victory at Round 6 in Miami showed that McLaren had caught Red Bull up in the development race.
Verstappen’s seventh GP win of the season at Round 10 in Spain then proceeded to a 10-race winless drought as Red Bull encountered balance issues in an attempt to push the performance of the RB20.
Newey announced he’d be stepping away from his Chief Technical Officer duties at Red Bull last May and effectively stepped back from F1 involvement immediately.
Reflecting on the 2024 campaign and Red Bull’s struggles, Newey told Auto Motor und Sport that “from what I could see, the ’24 car and through the very last stages of ’23 as well was, I would say, starting to become more difficult to drive,” adding “From what I can see from the outside, but I don’t know, the guys at Red Bull – this is no criticism – I think they just, perhaps through lack of experience, kept going in that same direction.”
Asked to respond to those claims ahead of the F1 75 launch event, Horner told select media including Motorsport Week “I’m not sure I haven’t seen those comments, but I think the issues are more deep-rooted than just last year.”
Rather than inexperience being the root cause of the problem, Horner felt Red Bull’s issues ran deeper and lauded the team’s approach to problem-solving.
“When you really dig into the data and some of the characteristics, you start to see them much earlier than that, certainly during 2023,” Horner added.
“It was a matter of unravelling it to understand what were the contributing factors to having a very peaky performance.
“I think that’s where the team have worked very hard to understand that and address it.”
Red Bull has worked hard to address weaknesses
Horner was also asked whether Red Bull had addressed the fundamental issues of the RB20 with its successor, the RB21.
“I’ll tell you next Friday,” he said, referring to pre-season testing in Bahrain.
“The team have worked very hard over the winter to work on some of the vices of RB20.
“I think we’ve had a good winter, and the team has been working incredibly hard.
“We’ll get the first indication next week as to have we managed to address some of the issues.
“We managed to improve them during the course of the latter third of last year, and we’ll see if we’ve managed to go a step further over these early races,” Horner concluded.
True enough, a Sprint victory in Austin, followed by an inspired 17th to first run in the Sao Paulo GP by Verstappen indicated Red Bull had turned a corner in the latter half of last season.
This was further underlined by a Qatar GP victory inspired by overnight simulator testing and set-up tweaks, but the question remains whether the peaky RB20 has been tamed into a more compliant, and fast, RB21 machine.
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