Horner says Red Bull will not repeat ‘unicorn year’ in 2024

Red Bull will not repeat the dominance it showed this season in 2024 as it sees diminishing returns on car development, predicts team principal Christian Horner.

Max Verstappen won 19 of the 22 races in 2023, with Sergio Perez winning two and only Carlos Sainz’s victory in Singapore for Ferrari preventing a clean sweep. Having dominated under the latest set of regulations, Horner says it’s not going to be possible to keep that same level of performance up moving forward.

“I think we managed to get it right,” Horner said. “I think we got it right in the first couple of years. And I'm sure over the next few years, we're going to see a lot closer racing. We will not repeat this year -- this will go down as a unicorn year for us, that's for sure.”

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Given the form of both the team and Verstappen, the pair remain heavy favorites for next year but Horner says Red Bull has seen that its development of its 2024 car comes with smaller gains possible and he’s expecting the rest of the grid to be following similar philosophies that will bring them closer in terms of performance.

“Obviously, there's always a reset as you go into the following year, and I'm convinced that you'll see a lot more cars that perhaps look like an RB19 philosophy going into next year," he said. "If you stand still in this business, you tend to be going backwards. I think that we have got up that curve quicker than others but the we're into a law of diminishing returns.

“And of course, with the lack of wind tunnel time that we've had, even though we transitioned early, we still had less time in practice than a great many of our opponents. So we've had to be very frugal and selective of where we apply that time for RB20 that will obviously try to build on the strengths of [RB]19.

“Evolution, not revolution. I think that all areas have been revisited in the car and we can't afford to have any complacency. So the car is very much an evolution of a theme. We're not re-inventing the wheel. So that has been very much the the route of the engineering path over the last last four months.

“I'm expecting the cars to look more familiar to a [RB]19 because it's inevitable that they will do.”