"Well, Toto tends to be a little dramatic anyway" - Red Bull boss' reacts to Wolff's public dismissal of his team's 2023 F1 challenger

Red Bull boss Christian Horner did not pay too much attention to the vociferous dismissal of the Mercedes challenger by Toto Wolff early in the season. The season started with a dominant display by the Austrian team in Bahrain but it also featured a rather angry reaction from Toto towards the deficit his team had to the front.

Mercedes continued its faith in the zero sidepod concept into the 2023 F1 season and that had not paid off. As a result, Toto was quite vocal in the media and even announced that the team would be making wholesale changes and ditching the current concept. Red Bull, on the other hand, had put together a dominant '1-2' finish in Bahrain and looked miles ahead of the competition.

Having said that, Red Bull boss Christian Horner was questioned on what he made of the Mercedes boss' immediate dismissal of the car and calls for a complete overhaul. Horner admitted that he didn't make much of it but was surprised by the German team sticking with the zero-sidepod concept.

He told Motorsport.com:

"Well, Toto tends to be a little dramatic anyway. I think what surprised us was that Ferrari had a very good car last year. And the natural evolution of that we expected it to be a very tight contender this year. We were very surprised to see Mercedes sticking with the concepts that had clearly failed the previous year."

"If you looked around the cars in pre-season, the cars that were closest in concept to us were the Aston Martin and McLaren," he added.

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Red Bull wasn't sure of the car until a few races into the season

When questioned if the team was confident about the car from the beginning and knew it was going to be a major success, Horner revealed that this was not the case and the team needed a few races to truly understand the picture.

“Certainly, coming out of Bahrain, we felt like, ‘we've got a really good package here,' he said. "But we didn't know whether it was circuit specific – temperature, conditions, asphalt.

"So, it's only when you've had a sample of two or three and you've gone to a couple of circuits that have been more troublesome, certainly for us the previous year, like Melbourne for example, that suddenly you're thinking, 'ok, no, this is really together'. And so yeah, it takes a sample of a few races to get a clear overview. Nobody was coming out of Bahrain getting too carried away.”

As it turned out, the car was truly a grid beater in the hands of Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez as Red Bull ended up winning all but one race in the 2023 F1 season.