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Publication date: 31 august 2020
Christian Horner has been left with a “sour taste” from racing that he feels Ferrari shouldn’t have won last year thanks to a controversial engine.
In September 2019, Ferrari scored three consecutive racing victories in Belgium, Italy and Singapore. However, a subsequent FIA investigation into its engine led Ferrari to reach an undisclosed deal before this season began.
Since then, Ferrari has been quite off the beat and, at the Belgian Grand Prix, they were the only team to achieve slower lap times than 12 months ago. While they blocked the front row at Spa last year, this time the two Ferraris cars qualified and finished the race in P13 and P14.
Ferrari admitted that changes in engine regulations had affected the performance of its cars, and has left Red Bull boss Horner thinking that the Singapore Grand Prix last September should go down in the record books as a victory for his team, with Max Verstappen finished. second.
Quoted by RaceFans, Horner said that “everything has left a bitter taste” and suggested that the power advantage that Ferrari enjoyed before the agreement helped them to achieve victory.
“Obviously, you can draw your own conclusions from Ferrari’s current performance,” said the Red Bull team principal.
“But in those races we should have won last year, possibly if they had run an engine that seems to be quite different from the performance they had last year.”
Although Horner refers to “racing” in the plural, it was actually only Singapore where Red Bull was the non-Ferrari leader. In Belgium and Italy, respectively, it was Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas for Mercedes.
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Ferrari’s current situation “is obviously very difficult for them,” added Horner. “But I think it’s that their focus has obviously been in the wrong areas in previous years, so they obviously seem to be struggling a bit with whatever is in that deal.”
He believes Ferrari now has the least competitive engine in Formula 1.
“You have Mercedes as a clear leader,” he said. “So I think Honda and Renault are reasonably close depending on the circuits and conditions. And then you have Ferrari, obviously, at the end of the queue. “
Horner’s counterpart at Mercedes, Toto Wolff, echoed those comments, saying: “Ferrari is an iconic brand and fantastic people who make these cars.
“I don’t want to put more oil in this. But we really were very stretched last year, and last year we suffered and lost some people in terms of being at the bottom of their heads. And that’s why I would probably follow Christian’s comment. “
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