Christian Horner now shares what ‘hasn’t helped’ development of 2024 Red Bull F1 car

Follow us on Google Discover

Red Bull Racing team principal Christian Horner has shared what has made the development of their 2024 car really difficult this winter.

Horner was speaking to PlanetF1 and reflecting on an incredible 2023 season and then turning his attention to next year.

Red Bull are in an enviable position on the grid right now and have a considerable advantage over their rivals.

Although the likes of Ferrari, Mercedes and McLaren started to close the gap towards the end of the year, Christian Horner and Red Bull had already turned their attention to the development of the 2024 car.

Horner has previously suggested that the team now face dealing with diminishing returns when trying to improve their going forward.

The genius of Adrian Newey means that Red Bull’s car is approaching perfection in terms of the current regulations.

It wouldn’t be a surprise if Red Bull are already thinking about the next set of major regulation changes in 2026, but there are still two titles to compete for before then.

Max Verstappen won’t let Red Bull rest as he tries to add championship numbers four and five to his collection.

Horner and Helmut Marko always strive for perfection as well, although the team boss has admitted the biggest challenge of his Red Bull career still lies on the horizon.

Horner admits problem Red Bull are facing in development of 2024 car

Back in 2021, Red Bull were handed a punishment for a minor breach of the spending cap.

It saw them lose some of their wind tunnel time and having won the championship in 2023, they’ve already been given the smallest allocation of testing time using the facility.

Asked if this has prevented Red Bull from reaching their full potential in the development of their 2024 car, Horner said: “It’s always difficult to say but I mean, the wind tunnel hasn’t helped for next year,” he said.

“Thankfully, we had a competitive car this year so we could actually transfer quite a lot of focus reasonably early, for us, onto next year’s car.”

Red Bull’s head start going into next year should mean they head into next season as the team to beat.

Aston Martin showed last winter that big steps forward can be taken during the off-season, but Verstappen and Sergio Perez are likely to have an even faster car underneath them next year.

Only time will tell if that’s actually the case, but it’ll be very interesting to see how each car looks during testing in February.