Christian Horner claims Red Bull is now the fourth fastest car in F1 as they ‘try to unravel’ problems

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Christian Horner believes Red Bull is now the fourth fastest car after they were out-qualified by McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes for the Italian Grand Prix.

Max Verstappen could only manage seventh on the grid ahead of teammate Sergio Perez who was eighth, as the pair were half a second off the pole lap set by Lando Norris.

Martin Brundle spotted how the Red Bull looked ‘unusual’ after Friday practice, as the Dutchman struggled with understeer throughout the session.

Horner, Verstappen and team advisor Helmut Marko were seen in deep discussions following FP3, when their problems appeared to continue into Saturday morning.

Having not found a solution to their lack of pace relative to rivals, Horner believes they have a lot of work to do to understand where they went wrong with the RB20 when speaking on Sky Sports.

Christian Horner believes Red Bull faces task to ‘get heads around’ RB20 issues

Verstappen did a run on a set of used soft tyres in Q2, but then went out on a set of new softs in Q3 and failed to improve on his lap from the scrubbed set.

Horner was perplexed when speaking after the session, as pressure grows on the defending champions: “We simply don’t understand how we did a 1:19.6 on scrubbed tyres and then couldn’t go faster on new tyres than a 1:20, the balance just isn’t there.

“You can hear from Max’s comments that something fundamental is happening that we aren’t on top of and we need to understand why on the older tyres we were able to do a lap-time and then on two sets of new tyres not get anywhere near it.”

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Red Bull’s problems with the RB20 have been well documented since the midpoint of the season, when it was clear the advantage they had over the rest of the field had been slashed by McLaren.

Technical director Pierre Wache identified three potential reasons why Red Bull’s 2024 upgrades have not worked as planned, and now the team is having to play catch up to rivals.

Horner believes they will need to work hard after running a few tests in the last few races to come up with a solution to why the RB20 has lost so much lap time.

“We’re looking at everything. We ran older spec last weekend [at Zandvoort] to see if that would address any of the issues,” said Horner.

“The reality is we still had the same handling characteristics with that spec from the beginning of the year. So that’s given an awful lot of data for the guys, but a lot to get our heads around.

“There is something that clearly isn’t working on the car and we’re trying to unravel that and understand the problem, how to implement it, then address it. So we need an engineering solution to an engineering problem.”

Red Bull hit with wind tunnel handicap

As part of the Aerodynamic Testing Rules (ATR) brought in during the 2021 season, Red Bull is currently suffering from a significant development handicap compared to the rest of the field.

Having led the Constructors’ Championship at the halfway mark, Red Bull was handed a further reduction in the amount of time they are entitled to in the wind tunnel and computer simulations.

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This makes things difficult for Red Bull to test parts for verification before they reach the car on track. The team also had an extra handicap last year as a result of their breach of the cost cap rules in 2021, meaning they had even less time to develop this year’s car.

As they enter the Italian Grand Prix with a 30-point deficit to McLaren in the Constructors’ Championship, Red Bull will be looking to limit the amount of damage they will take as they attempt to defend their title.