Christian Horner responds to reports of Mercedes adapting Red Bull's concept to its car

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has hinted that imitation is the best form of flattery as he responded to reports of Mercedes adapting to its concept in the future.

At the start of the 2022 season, Red Bull and Mercedes went for different concepts for their cars, with the Austrian team emerging as champions and Mercedes finishing the season in third. The German team's no-side-pods design hasn't yielded the results that it had hoped for. Mercedes is now seriously considering switching its design to Red Bull's.

Speaking to Sky News, Horner said:

"Yeah, absolutely. The regulations are still relatively young as it's only the second year of these new regulations and I'm expecting to see an awful lot of convergence during the course of the year and the grid is going to tighten up. So we need to make hay while the sun shines at the moment while we've got a competitive car and just keep pushing through the season."

"You put the Red Bull sidepods on our car and it won't change a thing" - Lewis Hamilton

Meanwhile, Lewis Hamilton isn't confident that if Mercedes goes the route of Red Bull's design, it will get the performance to fight for wins and podiums.

As per Crash.net, he said:

"I think we have what we have, and we're going to continue to try to work on it and extract more from it, and we'll see how quickly that can happen, or whether that's possible with the concept we have. And then in the short term we will start to find out whether or not we've got to make loads of big, drastic changes, I mean there are drastic changes which we will do.

"People keep talking about getting the new sidepods in the car, but it's not as simple as that. You put the Red Bull sidepods on our car and it won't change a thing, it literally won't change a thing, it might even go slower.

"It's about aero characteristics, it's how the car is balanced through the corners. There are so many different elements that people of course would not know because they're not aerodynamicists and you can't see it - there's a lot more to it.”

It will be interesting to see if in the upcoming races of the 2023 season, Mercedes shifts its car philosophy similar to its rival's and becomes more competitive and a contender for race wins once again.