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Red Bull boss Christian Horner feels that the Mercedes dominance era was tough to swallow for his team but they never lost sight of the target. The Austrian team was dominant in F1 until 2013 but then the 2014 F1 season saw a change in technical regulations and the German unit jumped the entire grid to the top of the sport.
While Mercedes enjoyed a seven-year dominance over everybody else in F1, this time was a huge struggle for Red Bull. Their power unit supplier Renault produced a subpar product that wasn't giving the desired results to the team. It wasn't until the move to Honda in 2019 that things started changing and not until 2021 that Max Verstappen would eventually beat Lewis Hamilton to clinch the title.
Looking back at Mercedes' heyday period, Christian Horner joked that seven years was long and 'you get less for crimes'. Christian Horner told ESPN:
“I mean, seven long years is a long time. You get less for crimes! We had to wait to get back into a competitive position, and we have to do a lot of watching of a lot of Mercedes winning and so on you know. But we never lost sight of our target. We were still winning races, pretty much every single year we still won races. So we never lost that target."
“It was just about putting the missing pieces into place. And then once we got a competitive power unit, bang, we were able to go toe-to-toe with Mercedes. So they were lucky they had it easy all of those years when we were running one-legged," he added.
Red Bull didn't expect the car to be this far ahead of the competition
Talking about the sentiment within the team ahead of the season, the Red Bull boss admitted that the team did not expect to be this far ahead of the competition.
“I don’t think any of us thought that the car we had was actually as potent as that," Horner said. "We could see from the race rounds that we looked competitive. The Aston looked like it was the closest to us, and the Mercedes didn’t look in great shape – they pioneered on with their concept."
“So we could only really tell our own performance and of course having been in Bahrain the previous year and losing out with reliability issues, we were determined to put that right," he added.
Red Bull is enjoying a dominant period in F1. It will be interesting to see what happens in 2024 as the 2023 F1 season seems to be a done deal for now.
