Christian Horner hints at “many long nights” amid Red Bull crisis

Red Bull team boss Christian Horner recently talked about the amount of effort his team needs to put in to fight for the championship against McLaren. He said that the Austrian team would be working late at night at their factory to resolve their performance concerns.

Red Bull continued their dominance at the start of the 2024 F1 season. However, as the season progressed, other top teams like McLaren, Mercedes, and Ferrari drastically closed the gap to the defending world champions. Red Bull themselves started facing issues with RB20, which was first reflected in Sergio Perez's poor performances after the Miami GP.

During the European leg of the season, the Austrian outfit was overtaken by McLaren in terms of overall pace. Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri started picking up their first few race wins in F1, and even pressurized the dominant Max Verstappen.

As quoted by Auto Motor und Sport, Horner spoke about the recent bump in performance in the Azerbaijan and Singapore GP, where Verstappen managed to secure P5 and P2, respectively. He then assured everyone that his team had found the issues in the car and were working day and night at Milton Keynes to fix it, whilst acknowledging that McLaren's pace has now become the benchmark on the grid.

"It is the second race after Baku in which we have improved. We have understood our problems and are now well on the way to solving them. The gap is big. There will be many long nights in Milton Keynes to straighten it out. We have to admit that McLaren is the new benchmark," Horner said.

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Christian Horner talks about Red Bull working on bringing changes to RB20 before the US GP

Christian Horner claimed that Red Bull has not yet analysed the race weekends at Baku and Singapore, but will soon bring changes to the car for the 2024 F1 US GP in Austin.

As quoted by the aforementioned source, he explained how the Baku and Marina Bay street circuits are unique and hence the data drawn from them cannot be used to make general conclusions about the car. He added that the team will bring changes after analyzing data for Austin.

"We have not yet completed our analysis of the last two races. Unfortunately, Baku and Singapore are special tracks that make it difficult to draw general conclusions. The changes for Austin depend on what our engineers filter out from the data now," Horner said.

After the Azerbaijan GP, where Oscar Piastri won the second race of his career, McLaren became the new constructors' championship leader by overtaking Red Bull. As of now, McLaren has 516 points, while the defending world champions are in second place with 475 points.