Red Bull team principal Christian Horner expects to see much closer racing in F1 in 2024, with a quartet of usual suspects leading the charge against the reigning world champions.
Red Bull has reigned supreme in F1 since the advent in 2022 of the sport’s ground-effect regulations.
After securing both the Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championships over a year ago, the Milton Keynes-based outfit continued its forward march last season, with its dominant RB19 delivering an extraordinary 21 wins out of 22 races and a third world title to the equally assertive Max Verstappen.
The team’s performance has been nothing short of remarkable, but the team’s early focus on the development of its 2024 contender is inevitably a cause for concern for its rivals.
“All areas have been revisited in the car, we can’t afford to have any complacency,” commented Horner.
“The car is very much an evolution of a theme. We’re not reinventing the wheel, so that has been very much the route of the engineering over the last 12 months.”
The competitive nature of F1 logically encourages teams to analyze and replicate successful models to close the performance gap.
The RB19 design – the most successful car in F1 history – undeniably proved superior in key aspects, meaning rival teams are likely to incorporate similar traits to boost their performance. Yet Horner is anticipating the field to converge, with closer racing a consequence.
“I’m expecting the cars to look more familiar to a (RB)19 because it’s inevitable that they will do,” he said. “I’m sure over the next two years we’re going to see much closer racing.
“We will not repeat the year. It will go down as a unicorn year for us, that’s for sure.”
Horner has singled out Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren and Aston Martin as the teams he expects to have stepped up their game to challenge the pecking order.
Mercedes has struggled in recent years, winning only one race in the past two seasons. But the Brackley squad is leaving no stone unturned in its efforts to turn around its fortunes.
Ferrari, on the other hand, has shown flashes of brilliance, the Scuderia inflicting on Red Bull its only defeat of the 2023 season, courtesy of Carlos Sainz dominant win in Singapore. However, save in qualifying, the Italian outfit was unable to consistently challenge Red Bull.
McLaren enjoyed a remarkable second half of the 2023 season, emerging as the bulls’ main adversary, but they still fell short of dethroning Red Bull.
Aston Martin, meanwhile, showed promise in the early part of the season, but the team lost steam as the year went on.
“Mercedes has great strength in depth,” Horner said as he assessed Red Bull’s opponents. “Obviously, they’ve had a difficult period, but they’ve great drivers, and they will get it together, one would assume, at some point.
“McLaren had a great back end of the year, and Ferrari show flashes of real potential.
“So it’s difficult to identify which of those is likely to be the biggest challenger, but you could take your pick almost.”
Asked about Aston and Fernando Alonso’s chances of disrupting the running order, Horner replied: “They made a huge step at the beginning of the year, but they really tailed off in the second half. I’m sure they’re looking to understand why that happened.
“But they’ve got big facilities, big resources, and they’ve recruited a lot of talent into that team, and Fernando was brilliant. He drove fantastically well. For a 42-year-old guy, I thought he was outstanding.”
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Horner assesses Red Bull’s quartet of 2024 challengers F1i.com.
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