Despite a slight dip in performance at last weekend's Monaco Grand Prix, Red Bull Racing boss Christian Horner is adamant that the team can still beat the runaway championship leader Jenson Button to this year's drivers title.
Red Bull introduced their new double-decker diffuser component to their cars in Monaco, but both cars struggled to get on the ultimate pace over the weekend. While Button romped to his fifth win from six races in 2009, Mark Webber could only managed 5th and Sebastian Vettel retired after a crash at Ste Devote.The results left Button 28 points ahead of Vettel and 30.5 clear of Webber, while the team trail the dominant Brawn GP outfit by 43.5 points in the constructors standings. Red Bull had emerged as the most consistent challenger to the Brawns over the first few races of the season, taking their maiden win with a 1-2 finish in the Chinese Grand Prix.
But despite the Monaco dip, Horner believes that the team are still very much in the fight, and that Monaco was never going to suit the aerodynamics of their car, while the next couple of races should play back into their hands.
"I think that we always expected that this track was not going to feature as our strongest circuit," Horner mused sagely, "The Brawn has always been good at this type of track, and Ferrari has definitely made progress over the last couple of races. So it will be interesting when we go to Istanbul and Silverstone. Theoretically they are tracks that should come to the characteristics of our car."
He pointed out that with 11 races still to go, his drivers will be ready to benefit should Button slip up. "We're still reasonably early in the season...a couple of bad races for Jenson, a couple of wins for Sebastian or Mark, can bring them right back into contention."
On the subject of the new diffuser, Horner admitted that the new part had distracted the team, but that the team has seen that the benefits were there in their performance.
"It was a lot of hard work, and a big effort from all the boys in the garage - they've not seen their bed for too many hours this weekend. And also back at Milton Keynes. But we can see that it has put aero performance on the car."
Horner also believed that Webber could have attacked and possibly beaten the two Ferrari drivers, who finished ahead of the Aussie in 3rd and 4th, had he not had traditional problems with passing slower cars around the tight Monte Carlo streets. "We pushed them [Ferrari] hard. Without being held up by Kovalainen, perhaps we could have got them at the final stop. Their car and the KERS has worked surprisingly well around here."
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