Christian Horner hit back at suggestions by Mercedes that Red Bull are sandbagging with their RB19 way more dominant than they are letting on, in the wake of the first three opening rounds of the 2023 Formula 1 season.
Indeed the stats show that reigning F1 World Champions Red Bull have won all three races of the season in dominant style, quick maths suggests that in the RB19, Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez have a car that is around one second faster than the best of their F1 rivals (Aston Martin) and north of that to the chasing pack, that has concertinaed among themselves.
That one-second so gap in race pace advantage, is probably a few tenths less in flat-out Qualifying Q3 mode; that’s why “Red Bull are on another planet” is probably the most used phrase in F1 circles these days.
But sandbagging? Mercedes, of course, the master of the ‘underperforming art’ spotted it with their young ace George Russell telling all and sundry that Red Bull were keeping their powder dry: “For sure, they’re holding back. I think they almost are embarrassed to show their full potential. I think realistically they probably have a six-to-seven-tenths advantage over the rest of the field.
“I don’t know what the pace difference looks like at the moment, but Max has got no reason to be pushing it, nor Red Bull. They’ve done a really great job to be fair to them, we can’t take that away, and we clearly have to up our game,” Russell told reporters in Australia.
His boss Toto Wolff was – as they say – singing off the same hymn sheet as his driver: “They have a straight-line speed advantage with the DRS open that is just mind-boggling But this is the meritocracy of the sport and if you have a car that’s that quick on the straight because you’re doing the right things, then it’s up to us to sort this out and find the tools to improve the straight-line performance.”
Stats show Red Bull are running away with the 2023 F1 championship and it’s just started
Heading to Round 4 of the 2023 F1 World Championship in Baku, the weekend after next, Horner retaliated to Russell’s comments “That’s very generous of him. His team of all people would know too well about those kinds of advantages.”
Asked if in Melbourne Perez and Verstappen in particular were not running conservatively during the race Down Under, Horner replied: “There’s always an element of managing that goes on in any race because it was a one-stop race, and a very early one-stop race, of course.
“There was an element of tyre management which was going on, which was what they were doing. Checo wasn’t hanging about… He wasn’t cruising around, holding back seven-tenths per lap because he didn’t want to show it,” added Horner sarcastically.
Notably, after the race in Australia, on a weekend in which Mercedes showed improvement, Russell even told reporters that he might have won the race had the red flags not intervened, to which Horner replied wryly: “So they could have won it, but we were sandbagging? Right, OK.”
Double F1 World Champion hardly cares about the “butt-hurt” the RB19 is inducing, for the former serial winners Mercedes were not so long ago, and less so that he has a dominant car in his hands: “There’s nothing really they can do.” [Is there a long-awaited taunt in there?]
Heading to Round 4, the Azerbaijan Grand Prix weekend from 28 to 30 April, in Baku the 2023 F1 World Championship standings are as follows:
