Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsRed Bull Racing

Red Bull takes motivation from Ferrari

Christian Horner says Ferrari’s victory in the Malaysian Grand Prix demonstrates to other teams Mercedes can be caught this year.

Sebastian Vettel took his first Ferrari win in only his second race for the team as the Scuderia mixed pace with a successful two stop strategy to beat Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg. With Mercedes having previously been so dominant - winning 16 of 19 races last year as well as the Australian Grand Prix by over 30 seconds - Horner says Red Bull can take motivation from seeing the defending champions beaten for pace.

“I think it demonstrates that everything is possible,” Horner said. “Ferrari have done a good job and things can change quite quickly. We’ve just got to focus on our issues and address them in the forthcoming races.”

Red Bull has been struggling with Renault power unit issues but it was a brake problem which slowed both cars in Malaysia. However, Horner says Red Bull was just slow overall at Sepang.

“We saw quite high degradation. We were managing the situation with the brakes - you could see there was quite a lot of brake dust coming out from quite early on - and we were concerned at one stage that we wouldn’t get to the end of the race. So it was a case of damage limitation, managing our way to the end of the race but to be honest with you at no point did we have any real pace.”

Click here for a more lighthearted look at some of the scenes from the Malaysian Grand Prix

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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.