Red Bull boss Christian Horner believes Formula 1 can look forward to a “classic” 2020 season between the top three teams.
Last year saw Mercedes make the championship battle a foregone conclusion early on with 10 wins in the first 12 races, eight of which went to Lewis Hamilton.
However, from the Austrian GP, Red Bull and Ferrari were able to be more competitive and, as they develop, that has raised hopes that no one team will dominate this season.
“We’ve got continuity across all aspects of next year with drivers, regulations, engine supply, engine regulation,” Horner was quoted by Motorsport.
“So unless somebody pulls a rabbit out of a hat, then I think we’re set for a really exciting year between, Mercedes, Ferrari, ourselves and it could be a real classic season.”
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Red Bull’s weakness, however, has been slow starts with Spain 2016, China 2018 and Monaco 2018 the only victories within the first six races of a season since 2014.
Horner though is confident this year can be different as he explained the early issues his team faced in 2019.
“The front wing regulation change and the tyre change over the winter seemed to affect us perhaps more than our opponents,” he said.
“And of course also, at that time we were still catching up from the power perspective.
“But I think from Austria onwards, we really got on top of that and the second half of the year for us has been very competitive.
“I mean, if I look back to 2018, we had a fantastic car at the start of the year, we should have been on the front row in Melbourne, we won the third race in China.
“We had a very, very competitive car at the beginning of ‘18 and again, that was with stability in regulations, and we have that again from 2019 into ‘20.
“You can’t gauge what others are doing, but hopefully, theoretically, the Melbourne [‘20] car will be an upgrade of the Abu Dhabi [‘19] car.”
While it would, of course, be brilliant for F1 to see Hamilton, Max Verstappen and the two Ferrari drivers go head-to-head for the title, last year does act as a reminder that it is not guaranteed.
And it should be mentioned that one reason why Red Bull and Ferrari were able to close in the second half of last year was that Mercedes had largely shifted focus to 2020.
Therefore, it will require their rivals to make pretty substantial gains to challenge the German manufacturer at every race this year.
Both have weaknesses to work on, the Scuderia needs to address their chassis shortcomings to compliment the engine advantage they held last year, while Red Bull still needs an all-round improvement.
And that was alluded to by their engine supplier Honda, as they looked ahead to their goals for this season.
“In 2019 it was, we don’t say ‘unstable’, but we had a preference in the circuit,” F1 managing director Masashi Yamamoto commented.
“We shouldn’t have that kind of thing, so we can tell Max ‘we are here’, good everywhere, in every race. We have to provide that kind of engine, doing good development.”