“You could see Mercedes had a hangover from that…” Christian Horner takes a cheeky dig at Mercedes about the 2021 championship fight
Follow Us
Christian Horner (IMAGO / HochZwei)
Mercedes dominated Formula 1 from 2014 to 2021, winning all of the constructor championships and just missing out once on the Driver’s championship to Christian Horner’s Red Bull and Max Verstappen in 2021. Their grip on the trophy was especially strong in the first few years of the ‘hybrid era’. In 2017 and 2018, Ferrari challenged them a lot better, but in 2019 and 2020, Mercedes reigned supreme.
But for the most part, they could not even touch Red Bull in 2022, and for the first part of the season, they were squarely third-best. They recovered after the summer break, but Verstappen and Co. were still superior. Mercedes’ only real occasion for joy came in Brazil, where they both won the sprint and got a 1-2 in the feature race.
Instead, Red Bull completed dominated 2022 (if not always on performance), winning 17 out of 22 races. When asked if he would have believed that this is the way how the season would go (before it got started) by GPFans, Horner said: “You would never have believed it. I think that especially off the back of last year, that took so much energy, last year’s championship, and you could see Mercedes had a hangover from that this year.”
Horner is very proud of his team, who adapted very well to the new regulations and produced a much better car than Mercedes, where many had thought that the opposite would be true: “I am just incredibly proud of the whole team, how it raised the bar again and came back fighting, adapting to the regulations, and being strategically sharp. We were on it when we needed to be and both drivers played their part with some massive victories.”
Christian Horner: Mercedes ‘hangover’ because they didn’t have a dominant car
Mercedes have seen their dominance in the sport come to an end, a year at a time. First, Lewis Hamilton lost the WDC to Max Verstappen in 2021, and this year, the Silver Arrows only managed a third-place finish (behind Ferrari), while Red Bull comprehensively put an end to the Mercedes ‘era’. The W13 just wasn’t that competitive over the whole season, and while it came alive sometimes (like in Brazil), that was never going to be enough.
When asked why he felt the German team experienced a ‘hangover’, Christian Horner said it was because they finally did not have a car which was levels above the competition: “It was the first time they didn’t have a dominant car. So to be able to beat them last year and to beat them again this year has been an incredible performance.”
However, in 2023, both Mercedes and Ferrari are likely to cut down the gap with Red Bull. The latter likely even had some performance in hand this year, as they had to turn down the engine. Moreover, the car ate through its tyres. Mercedes will have more wind tunnel time than both, and were fairly close to Ferrari in the second half of the season.
Stay Updated!
Aniket Tripathi
(1002 Articles Published)