Red Bull boss Christian Horner breaks silence on Adrian Newey's thinly veiled criticism

Red Bull boss Christian Horner has responded to Adrian Newey's claims that a lack of experience in the design team was one of the reasons behind the Austrian team's struggles in 2024. It was a strange season for the Milton Keynes squad.

Max Verstappen was dominant in Bahrain in what was the first race of the year and continued to do so until the race in Miami where McLaren brought its first upgrade. The upgrade helped the Woking-based squad make a significant jump in performance and completely close the gap to Red Bull at the front.

From that point, while McLaren ascended to the front and became the benchmark, Red Bull struggled to understand how to extract the most from the car. It wasn't until the race in Austin in the second half of the season that the team finally addressed the issue.

Looking back at Red Bull's season, Adrian Newey felt that the team was somewhat handicapped because of a lack of experience. However, this assertion has been refuted by Christian Horner, as the team boss said that some of the problems on the car went back to 2023 when Newey was a part of the team. He told the media, including Motorsportweek:

“I’m not sure I haven’t seen those comments, but I think the issues are more deep-rooted than just last year. When you really dig into the data and some of the characteristics, you start to see them much earlier than that, certainly during 2023.”

He added:

“It was a matter of unravelling it to understand what were the contributing factors to having a very peaky performance. I think that’s where the team have worked very hard to understand that and address it.”

Red Bull boss keeping cards close to the chest when questioned about RB21

Red Bull got on top of some of the issues with the car by Austin but the team still has some ground to make up compared to its rivals McLaren, Mercedes, and Ferrari. When questioned if the team was finally on top of the issues and would be back to the front, Horner kept his cards close to his chest as he said:

“I’ll tell you next Friday. The team have worked very hard over the winter to work on some of the vices of RB20. I think we’ve had a good winter, and the team has been working incredibly hard. We’ll get the first indication next week as to have we managed to address some of the issues."

He added:

“We managed to improve them during the course of the latter third of last year, and we’ll see if we’ve managed to go a step further over these early races,”

Red Bull's 2025 F1 season is going to be an important one as they will make all efforts to be back at the top of the Constructors' table.