Horner: “The pressure is on” as Red Bull tries to respond to McLaren

Christian Horner admits that “the pressure is on” Red Bull to respond after a dominant victory for Lando Norris in the Dutch GP.

Max Verstappen’s lead was cut from 78 to 70 points, and while that is still a healthy cushion the manner of Norris’s victory was a real statement of intent with nine races left to run.

However Horner made it clear that Verstappen is still in a strong position, despite McLaren’s momentum.

“We’re lucky that they underperformed in the early part of the year,” he said. “We’ve got a 70-point buffer, but that can diminish pretty quickly. It’s remarkable that it’s only Lando’s second win in that car.

“But he’s driving well, he’s finding confidence. And yeah, the pressure is on us to respond.

“We’re used to being in championship fights over the years, and we’ll dig deep. And we’re going to fight with everything we’ve got over the remaining nine races.”

Expanding on the form of Red Bull’s main rival he said: “McLaren is setting the benchmark. It’s clear in terms of pace, they’ve been that at the last couple of races, or certainly in Hungary, they were very competitive. In Spa it was Mercedes. Here, Lando in particular was very, very strong.

“Definitely, they have the fastest car at the moment. We have to respond to that. It’s not rocket science. There are no silver bullets in this business. It’s a matter of understanding the problem, addressing the problem, and then implementing fixes.

“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 in your car, in the window, as we saw earlier in the year, that kind of result is possible.

“So it doesn’t scare us. It just focuses the mind – we need to turn this around, we need to get it right.”

Horner admitted that Red Bull took got it wrong in giving Verstappen higher downforce spec at Zandvoort, which made him a sitting duck once Norris caught him.

“We took a little bit of a gamble because we thought that deg was going to be quite high,” he said.

“So we went up quite a lot on the downforce level, to maximum downforce. And that was a little bit of a gamble in that if the deg had been high, we felt it would help with the deg.

“As it turned out, the deg was low, very low, and it just made us slow on the straight line with Max. He did the hard part at the start and made a great start, and led obviously into the first corner, and was able to break the DRS.

“But pretty early on, you could see Lando was very comfortable. And then obviously passing pretty easy with the straight line deficit that we had, and the speed that he had.

“And then, to be honest with you, his pace thereafter, Max was just managing the race. The most important thing that we discussed before the race was if you can’t beat him, make sure that we beat the rest of the field.

“And I think at one point, we were concerned about Piastri coming up very quickly, passing Russell and then getting onto the back of Leclerc. But then he seemed to run out of pace, and we had that reasonably covered.”

Horner insisted that the team learned some lessons from the Dutch event.

“This weekend we’ve run the cars in different specifications, and I think that has actually given us quite a lot of valuable info,” he said. 

“I think the drivers’ feedback has been very positive into that as well, in terms of what they’re feeling from different setups. I think it hopefully now gives a real direction for the engineering group.”