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Christian Horner believes that Red Bull produced the best Formula 1 chassis in 2018, which he says was demonstrated at races where outright power was a reduced factor.
Red Bull scored four wins in 2018 and for the first time in F1’s turbo hybrid era the team earned a pole position at a track other than Monaco, when Daniel Ricciardo took the top spot in Mexico.
“I think [the] RB14 was a very strong car,” Horner told Autosport. “Arguably it’s the strongest chassis of the season.
“If you were to equalise the power between the top three teams I think you’d see that [the] RB14 has been an extremely good race car.
“Look at whenever the power unit [wasn’t] a factor, or as predominant a factor.
“We won in Monaco even with an MGU-K failure, we were second in Singapore, we won in Mexico again when altitude played a key role. Those races we [were] particularly strong in.
“Obviously we tended to run lower downforce levels to try and create the same top speeds, and as soon as you try to trim wing to do that you introduce other compromises into the handling of the car.
“But when we [were] able to run full spec, we should have had a front row lock-out in Monaco, and we had one in Mexico.”
Horner highlighted unreliability as the biggest source of frustration for Red Bull in 2018, with Ricciardo retiring eight times in 21 starts.
“It’s been a bitter sweet season in many respects,” he said.
“The victories [were] extremely sweet – winning in China, in Monaco, winning our home grand prix in Austria, and of course Mexico – they [were] the undoubted high points.
“The low points were the amount of times that the car [didn’t] make it to the finish, the amount of technical issues that we had to endure, and having to try and counter for deficiencies in outright power.
“That [was] the bitter part of it. Generally, on a Sunday, we had a very strong race car, and the drivers, when they’ve been able to, have raced extremely strongly.”