Christian Horner admits that Red Bull is fortunate that McLaren didn’t have a competitive car at the start of the season given the performance difference over the past run of races.
Lando Norris’ first victory, at the Miami Grand Prix, coincided with McLaren’s first major update, but at that stage Norris was already 53 points behind Max Verstappen. A win for Verstappen over Norris next time out in Imola opened that up to 60 points, and while the advantage peaked at 78 over the summer break, Horner admits the pace Norris showed in dominating the Dutch Grand Prix means that early return is likely to prove crucial.
“The drivers… we’re lucky that they underperformed at the start of the year, so we’ve got a 70-point buffer but that can diminish pretty quickly,” Horner said.
“It’s remarkable that that’s only Lando second win in that car. He’s driving well, he’s finding confidence. The pressure is on us to respond. We’re used to being in championship fights over the years, we’ll dig deep and we’re going to fight with everything we’ve got over the remaining races.”
Verstappen took the lead from Norris at the start of Sunday’s race but was powerless to hold off the McLaren during the first stint, and Horner says the focus was on maximizing the points return in second place from that point onwards.
“I think you’ve got to drive with the championship in mind and there’s been what, seven different race winners this year? So if you can’t win then you’ve got to be scoring the points. Obviously it’s not nice to be beaten by 22 seconds but it just shows when you get things right and you get your car in the window, like we saw earlier in the year, that kind of result is possible.
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“So it doesn’t scare us in any way, it just focuses the mind that ‘OK, we need to turn this round, we need to get this right’.
“It just shows that things can move very quickly. We were winning races by 20, 25 seconds, and Stefano [Domenicali] was asking us to slow down in the first five races. And then it can change very quickly, and that means it can change back the other way as well.
“We know we’ve got an issue, you can hear that Max certainly [on Sunday], he didn’t feel the car was responding to what he wanted. I think we’ve obviously got to be able to manifest that into a set-up that works these tires across all conditions. McLaren did that with Lando. We weren’t able to, but we limited the damage by, if you can’t win it, finish second.”