Christian Horner is not satisfied after Zandvoort: “We have some ideas on where to improve, but McLaren was unreachable”
It wasn’t a good performance at Zandvoort, or at least that’s what Max Verstappen thinks. While the home driver gave 101% of his RB20’s potential, the 22 seconds taken by Lando Norris’s MCL38 are more than just a wake-up call for the Milton Keynes team.
Christian Horner’s words after Zandvoort
Here’s what Christian Horner said in the post-race interview with F1: “Firstly, congratulations to McLaren and Lando, their car was in a different league today. We did everything we could, and Max turned P2 into the lead at the start, but you could see he couldn’t match Lando’s pace. In hindsight, the gamble we made with more downforce, after very little running on Friday, perhaps wasn’t the best choice.”
“We need to understand where the deficit is to McLaren and how we can improve the performance of our car. We have some ideas and will work hard to address them. We’ll have to respond, and I’m confident we have the strength and depth to do that. Max has a 70-point lead in the Drivers’ Championship, but we must keep scoring points as a team, and on the days we can’t win, we have to finish second.”
“Sergio (Checo) also had a solid race, and looking at his pace, he seemed strong, especially in the second half of the race, which is positive. So, we have a lot of work to do, but we learned many valuable lessons this weekend. We tried some things on the car from which we gathered good data to assess.”
“We must make sure we use this data; it’s time to digest what happened here and try to bounce back at Monza”, Horner concluded, thus setting the challenge for Sunday.
Photo: Oracle Red Bull Racing
