'Stopwatch Never Lies': Horner Comments On Red Bull's progress

Monday, 22 January 2024 at 01:00

The team principal of the 2022 and 2023 Championship winning team, Christian Horner, gave an update on Red Bull's development progress ahead of the 2024 season.

As a team that dominated the last two seasons and finished 2023 with an advantage over their rivals, Red Bull is naturally expected to start the 2024 season at the front of the pack.

The biggest question at this point in time is, just how far ahead will the team from Milton Keynes be at the first race of the season - Bahrain Grand Prix?

Multiple teams have admitted their cars for the first race of the 2024 season area are already finished as they prepare to work on the following upgrades.

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Can anybody match Red Bull's speed this season? That will all depend on whether the Austrian team can maintain its development pace. Christian Horner told Planet F1 about his team's progress:

"[The sim drivers] are saying it’s evolution, not revolution – it’s a simulator, and still a virtual world."

As it proved to many teams like Mercedes in the past (2022). Simulation data do not always completely reflect real-world data. On the other hand, Horner remains quite confident in his team's data correlation between the virtual and the real world.

"So, of course, you want a correlation between track and simulator, which has tended to be reasonable over the last couple of years."

The team principal remains conservative ahead of the season. The 50-year-old stated multiple times throughout the winter break he expects the remaining nine teams to slowly start closing the gap as Red Bull approaches the top of the development curve. He added:

"Hopefully, we’re making progress. But the stopwatch never lies, and we’ll only see when we get to the track."

The 2024 season will kick off with a pre-season test where we will see the first hints of each team's pace. Pre-season tests in Bahrain start exactly in a month, on the 21st of February 2024.