Red Bull team principal Christian Horner admitted Max Verstappen’s chances of winning the world championship this year look remote after the Austrian Grand Prix.
Verstappen retired on the first lap of the race when he was hit by Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s Mercedes. The rookie was given a three-place grid drop for the collision.
“It was desperately unlucky for Max to be just taken out at turn three,” Horner told Viaplay. “He’d done nothing wrong. He’d had a good start, he’d made progress.”
The championship-leading McLaren drivers finished the race first and second, ahead of the Ferrari pair. “It’s a shame because I don’t think we’d have raced the McLarens today but I think we would have probably been racing the Ferraris pretty hard,” said Horner.
Verstappen’s retirement means he lies 61 points behind championship leader Oscar Piastri with 359 points still available. Asked whether he thinks Verstappen can overhaul that deficit Horner said: “It’s unrealistic but you never give up.”
The crash capped a frustrating weekend for Verstappen at Red Bull’s home track. Having been third quickest in final practice he was unable to complete his final flying lap in qualifying due to a yellow flag. That left him seventh on the grid, two places ahead of Antonelli, who was also compromised by the same yellow flag in Q3.
It was a point-less home race for Red Bull as Yuki Tsunoda was the last driver to take the chequered flag in 16th place after a penalty for colliding with Franco Colapinto. However Red Bull’s junior team, Racing Bulls, scored sixth place courtesy of Liam Lawson.
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Horner, who replaced Lawson with Tsunoda in his team’s line-up after the second race of the season, said “he drove well, their strategy worked well for them.” However he felt the performance of some cars in the race had been “weird.”
“You’ve got the winner of the last race [George Russell, 62 seconds behind the race winner, and the Racing Bulls and the Sauber were catching the Mercedes at the end there. So it was very hard to predict.”
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