Christian Horner insists Red Bull’s sudden drop in performance last year was due to “deep-rooted” issues as he responded to Adrian Newey’s statement over the team’s group of engineers.
Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, who did ultimately win the 2024 drivers’ title, won four of the first five races before design guru Newey’s departure from the team was announced ahead of May’s Miami GP.
Lando Norris won that race and McLaren, as well as Ferrari, stole a march on Red Bull for the remainder of the season, resulting in Horner’s team finishing third in the constructors’ standings.
In a recent interview with German media outlet Auto Motor und Sport, Aston Martin-bound Newey was asked about Red Bull’s sudden drop in performance and said: “From what I can see from the outside… the guys at Red Bull, this is no criticism, but I think they just, perhaps through lack of experience, kept going in that same direction.”
Horner, however, insists Red Bull’s issues go back further to the 2023 campaign, when they won 21 out of 22 races.
“I’m not sure, I haven’t seen those comments, but I think the issues are more deep-rooted than just last year,” Horner said, at F1 75 Live on Tuesday night, where he was jeered by the British crowd.
“When you really dig into the data and some of the characteristics, you start to see them much earlier than that, certainly during 2023.
“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.”
Asked further about this year’s RB21 car, as Verstappen targets a fifth consecutive title, Horner referred to next week’s pre-season test in Bahrain.
“I’ll tell you next Friday,” he remarked. “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.”
Verstappen is joined by Liam Lawson at Red Bull this year, with the Kiwi replacing Sergio Perez. The 2025 F1 season starts on 16 March in Australia.
