The Red Bull team principal was encouraged by the pace Daniel Ricciardo showed compared to Sebastian Vettel during periods of the opening race in Melbourne, with the Australian finishing 15 seconds adrift of the Ferrari. With Renault working on a major power unit upgrade which it hopes to introduce in the middle of the season, Horner believes the gap can be closed even further.
“First of all, [Melbourne] demonstrates that you do not have to do too much to generate interest,” Horner said. “So something like the way those tyre compounds were varied as an element of strategy, and we had a better race as a result of it.
“Our plan is to make progress throughout the year. Ferrari is not a huge amount ahead, so if we can keep our heads down and keep pushing, it is feasible in the second half of the year we can take it to them a bit.”
And Horner also shares his drivers’ confidence that Red Bull will be similarly competitive in Bahrain next weekend.
“In Bahrain there is slightly more emphasis on power than there is [in Melbourne]. That is not going to pay to our advantage, but we have always run competitively in Bahrain on other areas of the circuit. So I hope we can just take this momentum into that event.”
