RB16 ‘a decent car’ but isn’t behaving as expected – Horner

Red Bull team boss Christian Horner insists his team have built a “decent car” which could be capable of fighting with Mercedes, but says they’ve not managed to unlock its full potential as it isn’t “behaving as expected”.

Red Bull went into 2020 confident they could battle Mercedes for wins on a regular basis, but the first three races has shown that whilst they appear to be their closest rival, they remain some way off the pace of the W11.

Horner fears Mercedes still haven’t shown their true performance, but remains confident of closing the gap.

“We are definitely closer in the race, but Mercedes still have an advantage,” said the Briton.

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“We have some anomalies with the car that aren’t behaving as we expected, so a lot of work is going in to understanding that and addressing that for the future races.

“The recovery [in Hungary] I thought was very strong, but still Mercedes have quite a lot of pace in hand as you can see.”

Asked if the RB16 is capable of fighting at the front, Horner said that would depend entirely on understanding why it’s not matching up with what their simulations say, but insists it’s a “decent car”.

“It’s a significant gap but it depends on how much performance we can unlock on RB16.

“We know we’ve got the fundamental basics of a decent car here, it’s just not behaving as our simulation tools predicted as it will and we need to understand that and making sure it’s achieving what it should be doing, which hasn’t been the case.

“I think there’s a lot of good data from this weekend, and the team’s working very hard to understand it and get on top of it.”