Lewis Hamilton held a tight lead over Max Verstappen at the end of the United States Grand Prix, then Christian Horner admitted Mercedes were getting close their Red Bull team
Max Verstappen admits he could easily be beaten by Lewis Hamilton at the US Grand Prix.
And Christian Horner has admitted the gap between Red Bull and its rivals is narrower than ever this season. This will raise hopes of Mercedes, McLaren and Ferrari that they can win races later this year.
Red Bull Of course, won both titles in 2023. And they haven’t been developing their RB19 car for weeks now, focusing entirely on their new machine for next year.
This opened the door for their competitors. Verstappen won the race from sixth on the grid, but was only two seconds ahead of Hamilton. If the race had lasted a few more laps, the British driver might have had the upper hand over his opponent.
Principal Horner said this is a side effect of the racing that develops in the final weeks of the season. “We started sixth and ninth and we knew it was going to be difficult to win the race today,” he said.
“We haven’t really developed the car since the summer break and you can see other people are bringing performance and distances increasingly converging, which you see in Formula 1, if you Stand still and you’ll go backwards. Of course we’re just focusing on next year’s car.”
And Verstappen admits that Hamilton could have beaten him if Mercedes had been a little more proactive in their pit decisions. “I don’t think we dominated, we only won by two seconds,” said the champion.
“For sure they could have won today with better tactics after the first stop. All weekend they ran very well, fast and today, for us, it was a problem about the brakes hindered my speed a bit. . But in general they were very strong this weekend.”
Verstappen was also dealing with an issue in his car which hampered his pace. He added:
“We changed the brakes after yesterday and it was not good. I had no good feeling under braking and I couldn’t get on top of it for the whole race.
“This is something we need to understand because around here when you’re not very confident on the brakes, you just don’t have the nice feeling, it can cost you quite a bit of lap time. It was a bit more difficult than I expected it to be. All in all, I’ve never really had any braking problems in my F1 career so far, but today it was definitely a bit of a problem. “
Leave a Reply