Horner blames narrow operating window for suboptimal performance

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has revealed that the narrow operating window of the RB20 has caused issues in recent weeks that saw the Milton Keynes-based struggle to stay ahead of its main rivals, McLaren and Mercedes.

Red Bull enjoyed a strong start to its 2024 F1 title defence, winning four of the opening five rounds. It looked like that the Milton Keynes-based outfit would dominate the third year of the current era of ground-effect cars until McLaren and Ferrari achieved a sudden lift in performance.

The Scuderia won in Australia and then in Monaco while the British squad took the victory in Miami. Following a successful upgrade in Monaco, Mercedes also started to claw its way back to the sharp end of the field. So impressive was the step the Brackley-headquartered outfit took that it won three of the last four races.

At the last race before the summer break in Belgium, Verstappen started from P11 as he served a ten-place grid penalty for exceeding his power unit allocation. Although he won the Belgian Grand Prix in 2022 and 2023 from lower grid positions, the Dutchman was seemingly unable to fight his way back to the front, and finished down in P5.

Similar to the last two year, the RB20 has excelled with its aerodynamic efficiency on straights and medium-slow corners, but has lagged in certain sections compared to its three main rivals, McLaren, Mercedes and Ferrari.

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has revealed that the root cause of the issues is the narrow operating window of the RB20 that has held the team's performance back in recent weeks.

“McLaren has a wider operating window than ours right now – the RB20 instead has a very narrow operating window and is what is putting our drivers and engineers in trouble.

"We need to recover something at the level of balance to widen the operating window, we are aware of this and we are focusing all our energies on this aspect.”

Despite the current difficulties, the Briton insists that the RB20 can be the field-leading machine again if Red Bull managed to find its sweet spot in terms of setup.

“If the car is in the window we can also be in pole with four tenths of an advantage as happened in Austria.”