Red Bull strategy showed Mercedes has 'quite a lot of pace in hand'

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Christian Horner believes Red Bull's strategy in the Hungarian Grand Prix showed Mercedes has "quite a lot of pace in hand".

Daniel Ricciardo was closing on Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg in the second stint of the race, and made his final pit stop early in what appeared to be an attempt to undercut the Mercedes pair ahead. However, both Mercedes drivers immediately picked up their pace significantly and Horner says the move was primarily designed to defend against the threat from Sebastian Vettel behind.

“We were mainly protecting against Sebastian," Horner said. "Once we reached the point where we believed we were safe until the end of the race we could see that Sebastian was pushing on with things, trying to get within and undercut, so we decided to take the stop, make sure that we got track position and at the same time put Mercedes under a little bit of pressure.

"What it exposed was that as soon as they were under a little bit of pressure, they were able to turn things up quite a lot.

“I think at times we’ve seen Mercedes’ true performance. It’s similar to Monaco here but it’s not quite the same and the next big opportunity for us will be Singapore. They’ve got quite a lot of pace in hand so there is still quite some way that we have to go to close that down.”

After Ricciardo finished the race in third position, when asked if he was surprised Mercedes had so much extra pace available to it, Horner replied: “Not really.

"I mean they haven’t finished here really the last two years, or had clean races, so this is the first time in three years they’ve had a clean race here. They were obviously cruising very conservatively and we saw their true pace when they could match Daniel’s pace and go quicker on a worn tyre compared to him on a new tyre.”

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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.