Christian Horner: Mark enjoys being within Red Bull

Red Bull team boss Christian Horner has responded strongly to the recent rumours of Mark Webber to Ferrari for 2013 and has said that he sees no reason why Mark would want to leave Red Bull, a team with which he has entered into the sixth season running.

Mark has been with the team through thick and thin – first when the team was a new one and slowly started to improve the car and move towards the front of the field. But after the championship loss in 2010(even in 2010 there were some incidents and the famous comment by Mark on the radio after winning the British GP that year “Not bad for a No.2 driver”), it has been a very unpleasant time for Mark at the Milton-Keynes based team. He played a second fiddle to the utterly dominant Sebastian Vettel last year and only had a consolation win at the last race in Brazil but that too under questionable circumstances with the team telling Sebastian to let Mark pass because of a gearbox issue – doubt creeps into the mind when people with gearbox problems were suffering huge loss of pace e.g. Lewis Hamilton(who had to retire eventually) but Sebastian was able to maintain the gap between him and Mark from the time of the intra-team pass till the end of the race. So it has been speculated since quite a long time that Mark’s time at Red Bull is short and he has been linked to Ferrari alongside his very good pal Fernando Alonso.

Christian Horner, though, has refuted such speculations while talking to AUTOSPORT “Every spring seems to be a reciprocal thing that Mark is going to Ferrari. He is not wearing red overalls. I think it is inevitable, almost every driver in the pitlane has been linked alongside Fernando [Alonso] next year, but we are focused on ourselves. Mark enjoys being within the team, he is happy here and we are happy with him. At the relevant time later in the year we will sit down and talk about the future as we have done in previous seasons. It’s something we will talk about later in the year. I’m not aware of any discussion. I think Mark is happy where he is, he is in a strong position here, but inevitably it’s part of this business that there is speculation.”

He was also all praise for Mark’s strong start to 2012 and having the better pace of the two drivers in qualifying and 2 Sundays. He said “Mark has driven very well at the first few races. He has been settled in the car, turned up with a different approach this year which has been evident and he’s in good shape. Four fourths…obviously we would dearly like to see him on the podium but they are vital points and he has driven very strongly. For sure, he can put a very strong campaign together. I think it is good they push each other; it brings the best out of Sebastian as well. You want team-mates to keep raising the bar. There is a good dynamic between the two of them; they have pushed each other and the car hard, which is what you want.”