Red Bull could face multiple threats in 2024 – Horner

Christian Horner says there are multiple teams that could emerge as a threat to Red Bull’s dominance in 2024.

Red Bull won 21 of the 22 races this season, with only Carlos Sainz’s victory in Singapore preventing it from completing a clean sweep. But with an average winning margin of a little over 10 seconds and eight occasions where Red Bull didn’t start on pole position, Horner believes the fact that four teams finished second at different stages of the season suggests any one of them could emerge from the pack.

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“Any three of the major teams – whether it be Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren – could be major contenders next year, and we fully expect the field to converge,” Horner told RACER. “You can see at different races it has done exactly that. So we can't afford to ease up, we’ve got to keep pushing.

“[Aston] could be. I mean, they were there at the beginning of the year. They dropped off significantly the second half of the year. But as they dropped off, McLaren emerged.”

While all four teams that Horner references had fluctuating form, the Red Bull boss says the consistency his team leaned on to build up a buffer early on allowed it to make a head start on preparing its 2024 car.

“The pack’s been rotating behind us… Thankfully, we had a good base to start because if we'd have been consumed with the very limited amount of wind tunnel we had in terms of developing RB19, it would really compromise us very badly on to ’20," he said.

“But because we had a great starting block with ’19, that enabled us to apply the limited amount of resource that we had available to RB20 reasonably early for us, while spinning both plates. That's why development has been very frugal on this car, really since the middle of the year."