Skip to main content

So what does Red Bull think it's gaining by firing Horner?

 One way of looking at Horner's firing is that the team considers itself in rebuild mode. They need a new development philosophy and perhaps a bit of a restructure to fill any gaps left by those that have left. Horner had potentially not demonstrated that he felt the need, or perhaps wasn't moving quickly enough, to achieve this.


The tools have been allowed to grow stale - the wind tunnel and so on - and that was under his watch. A watch that had no limitations when it came to funding there was no reason a new wind tunnel couldn't have been ready for the ground effect era and now it won't be ready to design the 2026 car.

It may even be that Horner's effectiveness was blunted in the cost cap era. He built RBR in Mateshietz's money-no-object passion project. If that meant building two updates so both drivers got pace added tot he car in the manner they could deal with RBR could afford it. For example the two sets of exhausts that the team ran in the blown diffuser era, the reworking of the chassis suspension pick-up points on one car for one driver.

But with the cost cap, maybe Horner simply defaulted to a Verstappen favouring update process because RBR weren't efficient to be able to develop wider. And lets be honest Horner got away with it until this year.

We will learn the truth in thirty years or so!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Drugovich to Cadillac?

 Regarding Valtteri Bottas closes in on F1 return with Cadillac for 2026 Whilst I can understand Alonso not wanting Drugovich to demonstrate any, considerably cheaper, pace in the Aston Martin, I am not sure that Drugovich is a threat to Stroll. There can't be many people, within or without Aston Martin, that believe a team with all of the money could not hire a better driver.  Newey has said that "Lance is much better than people give him credit for" which is fair enough I guess, but it's not the ringing endorsement that Alonso gave Stroll  - of being "super young, super talented and has the possibility to be world champion". The question is, has Drugovich been out of the seat for too long to be useful to Cadillac? Certainly it needs at least one of Bottas or Perez.  Perhaps Cadillac will take a punt on Drugovich as a rookie with three years of being in the garage, seeing how the likes of Alonso and of course Stroll operate.  That's apparently potential...
Post a Comment
Read more

Lessons from swapping Tsunoda' and Lawson's seats

Regarding the article :-   The hard lessons Yuki Tsunoda and Liam Lawson learned after swapping F1 seats There are clues to the problem in this article I think. Tsunoda's comments about how he felt driving the Racing Bulls. Tsunoda was comfortable in the Racing Bull because he'd been driving, testing and help shape that design philosophy for four seasons. This is a design philosophy that has to be a little forgiving in terms of set-up since it is expected to have driver changes at least from season to season, it being the F1 finishing school for RBR. Lawson hasn't had a season at either team. But even where he has had more races, Racing Bulls, he's 18 starts across three cars with no pre-season testing of each new challenger. Both of them have had a go at driving a car honed openly around Verstappen for the last seven seasons - every other driver since Ricciardo left has been hired in a support role. That honing has increasingly focussed on peak performance that Verstap...
Post a Comment
Read more

Alpine : Plus Ca Change ?

Regarding:- How can Alpine turn around its plummeting F1 performance? When though has the Enstone team been different? When it was Benetton? When it was Renault first time around I guess. Since then it's been making up the numbers really. Where has the statement been that it really, really, wants a tilt at the title? The closest statement was the big money signing of Ricciardo and the whole project around him as their race winning, franchise driver around whom they were going to build a future. But he bailed and that programme whithered away back into making up the numbers culminating with a return to being a customer team. Renault need to sell up as their heart has not really been in F1 since Crashgate. They could still buy title sponsorship if they want to maintain Alpine branding in F1 and the team can still have its collection of showy investors as it tootles around a closed shop league.
Post a Comment
Read more