Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsRed Bull Racing

Red Bull can catch Ferrari - Horner

Christian Horner says Red Bull's pace at the start of the season has encouraged him that his team could catch Ferrari later in the year.

The Red Bull team principal was encouraged by the pace Daniel Ricciardo showed compared to Sebastian Vettel during periods of the opening race in Melbourne, with the Australian finishing 15 seconds adrift of the Ferrari. With Renault working on a major power unit upgrade which it hopes to introduce in the middle of the season, Horner believes the gap can be closed even further.

"First of all, [Melbourne] demonstrates that you do not have to do too much to generate interest," Horner said. "So something like the way those tyre compounds were varied as an element of strategy, and we had a better race as a result of it.

"Our plan is to make progress throughout the year. Ferrari is not a huge amount ahead, so if we can keep our heads down and keep pushing, it is feasible in the second half of the year we can take it to them a bit."

And Horner also shares his drivers' confidence that Red Bull will be similarly competitive in Bahrain next weekend.

"In Bahrain there is slightly more emphasis on power than there is [in Melbourne]. That is not going to pay to our advantage, but we have always run competitively in Bahrain on other areas of the circuit. So I hope we can just take this momentum into that event."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.