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Former F1 driver and pundit Karun Chandhok termed Red Bull team principal Christian Horner as a "master politician" for using their "cold war relic" wind tunnel as an excuse for their issues on the track. The Austrian team has been struggling to get consistent performance out of the RB21 due to its narrow working window and balance issues.
The former world champions have been on a downward slope since the middle of the 2024 season, and there was some hope that it might mitigate their problems in the winter. However, they were unable to find a permanent solution for its weaknesses and started the 2025 season behind McLaren.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner cited correlation issues between their "cold war relic" wind tunnel and the on-track performances. While appearing on the Sky F1 Show podcast, Karun Chandhok, who had been a test driver for the Milton Keynes outfit in 2007 and 2008, dismissed Horner's claims and said:
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“Every time I listen to Christian Horner’s ‘our wind tunnel’s a relic of the Cold War’ thing, it’s just PR spin, isn’t it? He’s such a master politician. He’s the master of deflection. I don’t see Racing Bulls complaining about correlation."
"They use the same wind tunnel. I actually asked a couple of the people at Racing Bulls whether they’d struggled with the correlation. They said ‘nope’. It comes back to a Red Bull Racing issue,” Chandhok added.
Christian Horner had spoken about the difficulties of finding performance in last year's stable regulations and closing the gap to McLaren.
Red Bull team boss reflects on RB21's issues this year
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner stated that they had some "vices" in the RB21 that they were trying to solve, but it was difficult to find tangible performance in the final year of the current regulations.
Speaking with Sky Sports, the 51-year-old reflected on the issues and said:
"There are no bad teams in F1, and we've got some vices in the car and with the margins being so close, if you listen to Max's comments, if he is not confident in the car on turn-in, he is having that instability issue which is worth hundredths of a second, which on such a tight grid, is worth multiple places."
"We know when we tidy that up, performance will come, but when you are getting to the finer elements of a set of regulations like this, with the wind-tunnel that we have, which is a relic of the Cold War, it has its limitations," Horner added.
Red Bull are sitting P3 in the Constructors' Championship with 89 points and are already 99 points off McLaren at the top. They are also closely followed by Ferrari, who are just 11 points behind them.
