Red Bull boss Christian Horner has repudiated claims that the dialogue between the Formula 1 team’s top brass post-race in Bahrain should be described as a “crisis”.
Red Bull endured a sobering weekend last time out as troubles with the brakes and overheating culminated in the team’s two cars ending up a distant sixth and ninth.
That prompted a pressing meeting to be staged between Horner, Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko, Technical Director Pierre Wache and Chief Engineer Paul Monaghan.
The discussion is believed to have centred around the limitations ingrained within the squad’s RB21 car that contributed to Max Verstappen and Yuki Tsunoda’s woes.
However, Horner has denied the notion that Red Bull’s current predicament is a disaster, citing that the narrative surrounding the talks in Sakhir has been exaggerated.
“If you sit down with your engineers and discuss the race, I wouldn’t describe that as a crisis summit – we have lots of [discussions],” Horner told Sky Sports F1.
“I think the crisis summit was described as the meeting after the race in Bahrain – but you sit down and you discuss these things logically.
“There’s always engineering solutions to engineering issues.
“There’s not a crisis. We’re not where we want to be, we’ve got some issues with the car that we’re working through and the whole team’s working incredibly hard.
“I think we understand what the issues are, and we’re introducing a series of upgrades over the coming races to try and address some of those shortcomings.”
How Red Bull lost its competitive advantage
Red Bull started the previous campaign having retained a dominant edge over the opposition, but troubles with upgrades contributed to a sudden mid-season decline.
But Horner has contended that the inevitable convergence that has occurred as the current regulations have developed has accentuated the team’s visible regression.
“When you get stable regulations like this, the benefit of them is that you get convergence; all the teams are doing a very good job now,” he highlighted.
“You look how much faster we’re going the previous years and all the teams, especially the front teams, have converged. There’s no bad teams in Formula 1.
“We’ve got some vices in our car that with the margins being so close – if you listen to Max’s comments, if he’s not confident on the car on turning in, he’s having that instability issue that’s worth tenths, hundreds of a second, which in such a tight grid is multiple places.
“We know when we can tidy that up, performance will come.”
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