Horner admits Red Bull RB16 'still misbehaving'

Red Bull boss Christian Horner has admitted that something is still not right with the team's 2020 championship contender.

The squad struggled with the car's set-up in the build-up to last week's Hungarian Grand Prix, with Max Verstappen only seventh fastest in Friday practice and his team mate Alex Albon out of the top ten.

The team was even forced to use one of its permitted wildcard exceptions to break curfew allowing thems to work on the car before Saturday's practice and qualifying sessions.

Ultimately a terrific start to the race meant that Verstappen was able to battle his way to second place behind race winner Lewis Hamilton, despite an unfortunate mishap on his way to the grid that had the Red Bull mechanics scrambling to make repairs to Verstappen's car.

• Full potential of 'stronger Albon' yet to be untapped - Horner

“The mechanics did an amazing job," Horner said of the incident. “To get his car repaired in twenty minutes on the grid is incredible and you could see the sweat dripping off them."

Horner agreed that Verstappen's eventual second place in Hungary was down to a mix of circumstances, including a botched start for Valtteri Bottas.

"To split them was mainly due to strategy and Max’s first lap," he told Crash.net. "The recovery in the race I thought was very strong, but still Mercedes have quite a lot of pace in hand as you can see.”

Horner says that he remains focussed on tracking down the set-up issues that have been plaguing the team throughout the first three outings of 2020.

“I think we have got something misbehaving aerodynamically," he conceded. "It's a matter of understanding that and addressing that.

“We have some anomalies with the car that aren’t behaving as we expect them to, so a lot of work is going in to understanding that and addressing that for the future races.

"In certain conditions the car is behaving as expected," he continued. “The car is in better shape in race trim and strategically we are sharp.

"We are definitely closer in the race, but Mercedes still have an advantage.

"We have updates that aren’t behaving as expected, compared with pre-season testing, so we need to go through all the data we’ve collected and understand it before Silverstone.

"The team will work hard to try and understand it and resolve it as quickly as we can," he continued. "We actually have some very good data from [Hungary]."

Three races into the season, Red Bull is currently in second place in the constructors championship, but with less than half the championship points of Mercedes.

Verstappen is currently third in the drivers standings, but again some way off the points tally of the two Mercedes drivers.

Gallery: The beautiful wives and girlfriends of F1 drivers

Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter