Max Verstappen was closely pursued by Lewis Hamilton at the end of the US Grand Prix, and Christian Horner acknowledged that Mercedes were closing in on his Red Bull team.
At the US Grand Prix, Max Verstappen acknowledged that Lewis Hamilton could have easily defeated him.
Christian Horner acknowledged that this season, the distance between Red Bull and their competitors is smaller than ever. It will give teams like Mercedes, McLaren, and Ferrari hope that they can win races from now until the year’s end.
Red Bull have, of course, already won both titles in 2023. And they have not been developing their RB19 cars for many weeks now with attention turned fully to their new machine for next year.
That has opened the door for their rivals. Verstappen won the race from sixth on the grid, but did so by only two seconds over Hamilton. If the race was a couple of laps longer, the charging Brit would most likely have got the better of his rival
Team principal Horner said it was a side-effect of the development race in these late weeks of the season. “We started sixth and ninth and so we knew it was going to be very tough to win the race today,” he said.
“We haven’t developed the car at all really since the summer break and you can see others are bringing performance and the gap is converging, which just shows in Formula 1, if you’re standing still you’re going backwards. Of course, all of our focus is on next year’s car.”
And Verstappen admitted that Hamilton might have beaten him had Mercedes been a little more proactive with their pit decisions. “I don’t think we were dominant – we only won by two seconds,” said the champion.
For sure, they could have won today if they had a better strategy after the first stop. The whole weekend they were very good, quick and today, from our side, the brake issues were hampering me a little bit for my pace. But in general they were very strong this weekend.”
Verstappen’s pace was also slowed by a problem with his vehicle. “We changed the brakes after yesterday, and it wasn’t good,” he continued. Throughout the entire race, I struggled to maintain control because I had no good feeling when braking.
“This is something we need to understand because around here, it can cost you quite a bit of lap time when you’re not very confident on the brakes, you just don’t have the nice feeling. It was a little more challenging than I had anticipated. In my F1 career thus far, I have generally never really had braking issues, but today it was definitely a bit of a challenge.