Red Bull F1 boss Christian Horner believes that Mercedes will soon join Red Bull and Ferrari in the fight for victory, although in the first five races they were far behind the fastest in both qualifications and the race.
Despite the new technical regulations, Red Bull managed to stay in the fight for victory and in the first five races Verstappen won three times, but Leclerc and Ferrari still lead in both championships thanks to better reliability.
For the first time in the hybrid era, which began in 2014, Mercedes is not in the competition to win, so Hamilton and Russell must hope for problems for Ferrari and Red Bull drivers if they want to finish on the podium.
Unlike the rather fierce fight between Red Bull and Mercedes last season, which often took place off the track on the technical and political level, this year Ferrari and Red Bull, at least for now, are behaving as correctly as possible.
Mattia is a decent person, he is just another type of competition “, said Horner.
“But you’re writing off Toto [Wolf]. There is still plenty of time to get back into the game. We are focused on ourselves and all nine teams are our rivals. ”
“Last year there were a lot of poison arrows, a lot of things happened off the track, as well as on the track. But this year we are all much more focused on what is happening on the track and I think the race between Charles and Max was great. ”
“The first few races were great, and if this continues during the season, at some point it will inevitably conclude that the competition is intensifying and the stakes are getting higher in the second part of the season.
“We have certainly watched the race so far with a lot of respect, fierce but fair.
“And like I said, I think you’ll see that Mercedes joined that fight pretty quickly.”
Red Bull did a great job with improvements on their RB18, which brought them a shade ahead of Ferrari, but Binoto commented that the advantage is not great and that Ferrari will bring a “significant” package of improvements to Spain.
“It’s very close to Ferrari,” Horner added.
“We had great races and you can see great respect between Charles and Max. They enjoy racing with each other, you see. ”
Ferrari leads the constructors’ table with six points more than Red Bull, while Mercedes has 56 points less than Red Bull in third place.
