Christian Horner says Red Bull has a lot of work to do to try and catch McLaren ahead of the next race in Austin, following Lando Norris’ dominant victory in the Singapore Grand Prix.
Norris pulled out a lead of over 20 seconds in the opening part of Sunday’s race, although he lost some time before his pit stop when he locked up and very nearly hit the barrier. McLaren had asked its driver to open up an advantage of at least five seconds by around lap 15 but Norris went far clear at that point, with Horner admitting it was impressive pace that Red Bull had no answer to.
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“Yeah, that was taking the p***, although I shouldn’t say that in a public capacity!” Horner said. “The pace he had in hand on that tire at that point in time was… at that point we’ve conceded the race on pace. He touched the wall for the first time, then he touched it for the second time but they’ve got away with it.
“I actually think Max [Verstappen] drove a very strong race, and that was what we had, which, when you consider where we were a couple of weeks ago, I think we have made some real progress and obviously, we’ve got a lot of work to do before Austin.”
Horner told Verstappen over the radio about the two occasions Norris touched the barrier during the race, suggesting it showed how close the leader came to costing himself the win.
“It’s to show him he was a lucky bastard. You know, hitting the wall once is usually a wake up call. And to hit it twice, you’ve got somebody smiling on you… Hope I don’t get done for ‘lucky bastard’!”
While joking about the recent requests for drivers not to swear on team radio or in official press conferences, Horner says he was satisfied with the return in Singapore despite Verstappen losing seven points to Norris in the drivers’ championship.
“You have to congratulate Lando and McLaren. They had a very strong car this weekend, and particularly on the first stint they were very quick. I think on the hard tire, we looked in better shape. But of course, the gap is way too big by then at a track that, anyway, is very hard to overtake.
“So I think if you roll back the clock to Friday night, if you’d have said we’d qualify on the front row and take second place a significant amount ahead of the rest of the field, I think we would have certainly taken that.
“But obviously the gap to Lando was significant in the first part of the race, and we’ve now got the best part of a month to work hard and try and bring some performance to the car in Austin.”