Christian Horner asserts Red Bull ‘trusted’ Max Verstappen’s feedback despite ignoring the Dutchman in 2024
Christian Horner insisted that Red Bull did listen to Max Verstappen's feedback, despite previous claims made by the Dutch driver.
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Christian Horner and Max Verstappen (Via Imago)
Red Bull faced a major performance slump in 2024. The Austrian team fell behind McLaren and Ferrari. Max Verstappen found himself struggling before making a stellar recovery to win the title. Now, Christian Horner has claimed that it was the Dutch driver who managed to keep the team on-track.
Previously, Verstappen had asserted that Red Bull ignored his suggestions during the development of the RB20. The Austrian team was having a hard time managing the balance issues of the car. Though, by the end of the season, Red Bull had somewhat tackled the problem.
Christian Horner insisted that the team relied heavily on driver feedback, particularly of Max Verstappen. Horner recalled that the 27-year-old would spend extra hours with engineers to highlight issues. The Briton emphasized that Red Bull did trust the Dutch driver’s inputs before working on tackling the car problem.
At that point, you rely very heavily on your driver feedback… Max really stepped up. He put in a huge amount of time with the engineers to give his feedback that didn’t correlate with some of the tools, but it was his feedback that we trusted, and then that started to unwrap some of the issues.
Christian Horner told PlanetF1
Red Bull faced ‘perfect storm’ in 2024
Milton Keynes was at risk of losing out to three different teams. This situation even led to Max Verstappen being winless for four months. Christian Horner labeled the nightmare scenario as a perfect storm for Red Bull. Though, the Briton admitted that this might’ve been due to the current cold-war era wind tunnel used by the team.
It’s probably a perfect storm… perhaps we reached some of the limitations of our tunnel.
Christian Horner noted
Certainly, Max Verstappen remains a highly important figure at Red Bull on and off-track. The reigning world champion’s inputs helped Milton Keynes better understand its car issues and bounce back with upgrades. Thus, Horner’s squad will likely never ignore any more suggestions made by Verstappen in the future.
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Armaan Agarwal
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