While Mercedes is still the team to beat, Red Bull are confident of making it “difficult” for them this season.
Having already broken the record with six consecutive double-championship successes, indications from testing suggest the Mercedes train could well continue down the tracks in 2020.
However, after a more dominant season last year, winning 15 of 21 races, Red Bull boss Christian Horner doesn’t expect a repeat of those figures again.
“I think the gap has [closed],” he stated via Crash.net.
“That happens with continuous regulations and when you have stability the designs converge and some of those converge closer than others.
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“I think it is inevitable that the grid will concertina a little bit which is healthy for Formula 1. The most important thing for us is to converge that gap with Mercedes, that is our target as they are the absolute benchmark.”
Of course, the man most likely to lead Red Bull’s charge is Max Verstappen but he insists he still needs the tool to do the job and take the fight to the Brackley-based squad.
“It’s not only me… the package needs to be quick so let’s see,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald.
“We have been working really hard all winter to be able to start the year in a better fashion compared to last year and now it’s time to find out if it’s true or not.
“Lewis has been winning a lot, Mercedes has been winning a lot … as a team we try to make it difficult for them,” Max added.
“Lewis and the team both do a great job so it’s now up to us to try to give them a harder time.”
And while it was Mercedes who led the way at the end of testing, the Dutchman doesn’t think those results were representative.
“I don’t really look too much at the times because you don’t know what other people are running,” Verstappen said.
“More runs have been done on different days, some days were very windy, some were not, some days were very cloudy, some were sunny, so it’s difficult to tell.
“We just try to do our own program, which I think we pretty much did. [We] evolved it, we were happy about it, it always seems you could have done better.
“But I am just looking forward to getting started so we don’t have to keep answering all those questions about winter testing … it’s not really representative, everybody is just doing their own program.”