Christian Horner denies Red Bull is in crisis

Rumours of ‘crisis talks’ among Red Bull’s Formula 1 chiefs have been denied by team principal Christian Horner, who says any conversations that took place after Bahrain were simply opportunities to discuss issues “logically”.

Discussions were known to take place immediately after Red Bull’s tepid Bahrain Grand Prix performance, where Horner and adviser Helmut Marko discussed the RB21’s current foibles with technical director Pierre Wache and chief engineer Paul Monaghan as the team’s cars finished sixth and ninth in the race.

Suggestions are that there were further discussions with Red Bull’s shareholders in Dubai, although Horner did not comment on that.

But speaking to Sky Sports F1, Horner did state that the Bahrain discussions were part of the usual post-race debrief, and asserted that Red Bull was not ‘in crisis’ amid its fluctuating fortunes in F1 this year.

“If you sit down with your engineers and discuss the race, I wouldn’t describe that as a crisis summit – we have lots of [discussions],” Horner said after opening practice for this weekend’s Saudi Arabian GP.

“I think the crisis summit was described as the meeting after the race in Bahrain – but you sit down and you discuss these things logically. There’s always engineering solutions to engineering issues.

“There’s not a crisis. We’re not where we want to be, we’ve got some issues with the car that we’re working through and the whole team’s working incredibly hard.

“I think we understand what the issues are, and we’re introducing a series of upgrades over the coming races to try and address some of those shortcomings.”

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

Horner felt that Red Bull’s apparent drop in the pecking order was mostly a function of convergence among the field as the current ruleset has remained relatively static over the past four seasons.

Red Bull started 2024 having appeared to retain its dominant form from the previous season, but dropped back through the year as the likes of McLaren and Ferrari continued to improve.

Horner now feels that the development over the previous seasons has created incredibly close margins, which exposes even the slightest issues in a car.

“When you get stable regulations like this, the benefit of them is that you get convergence; all the teams are doing a very good job now,” he said.

“You look how much faster we’re going the previous years and all the teams, especially the front teams, have converged. There’s no bad teams in Formula 1.

“We’ve got some vices in our car that with the margins being so close – if you listen to Max’s comments, if he’s not confident on the car on turning in, he’s having that instability issue that’s worth tenths, hundreds of a second, which in such a tight grid is multiple places.

“We know when we can tidy that up, performance will come.”