Christian Horner: “Things can change so quickly…”

Sebastian Vettel may already have a commanding lead in the World Championship, but his team boss Christian Horner is adamant that there’s no room for complacency given that three teams are leading the chase.

Ferrari, McLaren and Mercedes have all given Red Bull a hard time over the last couple of races, and with everyone throwing updates on their cars Horner says that the balance of power may shift over the coming races.

“They’re all great teams,” said Horner. “It would be a foolish person to write off Ferrari, and Fernando in particular. McLaren made a big step just on the eve of the championship, and they’re quite capable of making another big step. And Mercedes are showing real flashes of pace.

“So you can’t underestimate any of our rivals. We’re trying to focus on our own performance and keep learning and keep delivering the kind of performance that we saw today.

“It’s fantastic to be heading to Barcelona with a 43 point lead in the constructors’, and Sebastian is 24 points in the drivers’. But as we all know those points can vanish pretty quickly. We gave away 43 points pretty easily here last year, so it was a very sweet victory today 12 months on.

“The bottom line is things can change so quickly. Fernando gave us such a hard time today, nobody else seemed to be in the same ball park. Three weeks ago it was McLaren, and it looks like Mercedes have made a step.

“Once you hit the sweet spot there’s quite a big performance return from that. We can’t afford to be complacent. We just keep our heads down, keep pushing, keep trying to optimise, keep trying to learn and get performance to the car. That was our 18^th win in two and a bit years, so we’ve come a long way and we’re building on that experience.”