Christian Horner admits that the Belgian one-two was an unexpected result for RBR, given the team’s history at the track and the challenges it faced over the weekend.
“Power is the dominant factor here, certainly in the first and third sector,” said Horner. “And that was arguably one of our most competitive races of the season, we had very strong race pace. We thought it would perhaps favour some of our opponents more arriving here, but it just demonstrates how difficult it is to predict performance.
“I think for the team it’s been a phenomenal weekend. Yesterday was massively difficult with the conditions. I think as a team it demonstrates how strong we are as a unit to recover from difficult situations, to get the calls right, and the strategies right.
“The car’s had tremendous pace, the drivers have done their bit, and it just shows the solidarity that we have as a unit. It was a massive result for us this weekend, not only to get the pole and the third but a one-two here in the fashion that we did.”
Horner said it was an emotional day for Adrian Newey, because of the concerns about tyre blistering: “He was pretty stressed about the tyre. And he takes that responsibility obviously incredibly seriously. Not of us wanted to be putting the drivers in any way at any risk, and I think the sense of relief…
“It was obviously a very tense race and particularly those first three or four laps on tyres that looked at best secondhand going off the grid. And that was why it was right for our first one-two at this circuit for Adrian to go and get the trophy.”
Horner played down RHR’s role in creating its own tyre problems by being the only team to run a camber level outside Pirelli’s recommendations.
“I think it’s a unique problem. If we’d had proper dry running on Friday we would have tuned out of the car, potentially. On the prime tyre there was no issue at all and the tyre was very clean, you could see particularly on the front running cars, all the cars were affected by blistering. Fernando’s looked pretty bad at one stage, Lewis was having issues, as was Jenson.
“All the frontrunning cars seemed to be having issues, and I think it was a consequence of no real dry running in P1, P2 or P3. The forces that are put into the tyre here are somewhat different to some other circuits.”
Adam Cooper F1 