Horner reveals the origins of Red Bull’s issues with a floor upgrade in Barcelona last year, marking the start of a troubling trend.
Christian Horner today admits that Red Bull’s behavioral problems have been brewing for over a year.
Since the issues became apparent and evident during the recent Grand Prix races, the team has frantically retraced its development steps to identify where things went wrong.
“As you know, we launched an audit on our car’s behavior with the updates. We traced back the development history and it turned out that the first mistake we made was not on this year’s RB20, but last year’s RB19. It started with a floor upgrade in 2023 in Barcelona,” Horner reveals today.
“It was also from this Grand Prix that Checo (Perez) began to have issues with the car. We simply did not take it seriously because Max (Verstappen) continued to win.”
“No F1 car is perfect, you will always find a problem here or there, things to correct or progress. But we had such a lead with this car as well. Nothing suggested the negative spiral that was setting in until now.”
“This explains the experiments we conducted with the floor in Baku and the data collected will be used to finalize the package planned for Austin. We have about a month without races, we will take advantage of it.”
And the team’s advisor, Dr. Helmut Marko, also added: “We took another very bad turn this year at Imola.”
Last weekend, in Baku, Red Bull thus tested two new floor specifications designed to solve some of the now identified issues causing poor balance and car setup difficulties.
“I think it’s a step forward, yes,” said Verstappen, who still struggled in Azerbaijan but attributed this to a setup error after qualifying.
“I’m sure we can do better. The fight isn’t over yet. We didn’t win the race, but we were in the fight with Checo. From now on, we can fight for wins at any time if we continue to improve the car step by step, especially after what we have discovered.”
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Red Bull’s Spiral Started in ’23, Horner Confirms Red Bull’s Spiral Started in ’23, Horner Confirms
