Red Bull team boss Christian Horner has expressed his satisfaction with his team’s performance in the race.
Following Daniel Ricciardo’s back-to-back wins in Hungary and Spa, the Milton-Keynes were predicted to struggle for outright performance at the power-dominant Monza this weekend and switched their attention to maximising the car’s performance and getting the best result on offer.
Ricciardo and team-mate Sebastian Vettel came home in fifth and sixth respectively, exercising alternative race strategies to get around their power disparity and Horner was delighted to have only been beaten by the Mercedes and Williams cars.
“I think fifth and sixth was the absolute optimum today,” said Horner.
“We picked two different strategies, an aggressive one with Sebastian to undercut the McLaren, which worked and gave him track position but unfortunately made his tyres marginal at the end of the race.”
“With Daniel we took the opposite approach as he was running in clear air.”
Horner believes that Vettel’s difficulties with tyre wear as he pitted earlier than his rivals and Ricciardo’s speed when running his strategy meant that the latter’s strategy proved to be quicker than the former’s.
“We ran him long in the first stint with a shorter second stint and then his passing moves to come back through the field were truly impressive and obviously with Sebastian struggling with tyre degradation due to the length of the stint, it became inevitable that the two were going to swap positions.” Horner added.
“But fifth and sixth place, at a circuit dominated by Mercedes-powered cars, is damage limitation achieved.”
