I Nearly Got My Violin Out – Christian Horner

Red Bull team principal, Christian Horner had his own say on Hamilton saying that Ferrari had a few tricks. He joked that he ‘almost got his violin out’ after hearing Lewis’ comments. The 4-time world champion believed that “a few trick things” had given Ferrari extra power this year. This was because, the Scuderia has emerged with the most efficient engine compared to Mercedes, Renault and Honda.

Ever since the introduction of the hybrid engines in 2014, Mercedes has had the superior engine. Now, Mercedes are stuck playing catch-up and are obviously frustrated. But, Red Bull team principal Horner is all out of sympathy for the Silver Arrows.

In 2019, Red Bull will switch to Honda power units, joining sister team Toro Rosso. The Japanese manufacturer has been making steady improvements this year. However, Horner opted to be realistic, admitting that there is still a lot of work to do. He said, “[Honda] need to make a step. As you can see, Ferrari and Mercedes… just to hear Lewis moaning about Ferrari, I nearly got my violin out!

“But the gap is significant. I think if we just close that, and Honda are making great progress, they’re scoring points regularly, Pierre [Gasly] has been very, very upbeat about them and you can see they’re making headways.”

It was a mixed day for Aston Martin Red Bull at Spa. They picked up a podium, in the form of Max Verstappen and a retirement for Daniel Ricciardo. Verstappen slotted into P3, while Daniel Ricciardo was inadvertently dragged into a first lap incident. A McLaren front wing speared into his rear wing eventually led to a team decision to retire.

“For Daniel it was a great shame he got caught up in someone else’s accident at the first corner,” Horner said. “It looks like Hulkenberg misjudged his braking to cause the chain of events and the damage to the front and rear of Daniel’s car was significant.

“The mechanics did a wonderful job in getting the car turned around but unfortunately having lost two laps to the lead car, and with engine mileage at a premium, we had to make the decision to retire the car from what was only ever going to be a 16th place finish for Daniel.”