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We are working on reliability, says Horner

Red Bull Racing chief Christian Horner has said that his team will soon get to grips with their reliability issues, after a faulty brake disc cost Sebastian Vettel a chance of victory in the Australian Grand Prix.

The Milton Keynes squad monopolised the front row in Melbourne but were unable to convert it into anything more than ninth place for Mark Webber, after Vettel’s mishap. Horner said that despite this, his team had the fundamentals to go far.

“Starting first and second on the grid, the whole team is pretty pissed off to have only come away with two points,” he said. “But we will brush ourselves down. We take away from here the confidence that again we have a very fast car, and we will work hard on whatever the problem is that caused this issue. We will be stronger in a week’s time.”

“Don’t panic it is a long season. We know we have got a fast car and I would far rather have a fast car than a slow car. We’ve had two pole positions. We should have been sitting on 50 points and Sebastian is sitting on 12. But there is still a long way to go and the season will have many different twists and turns.

“I think he [Vettel] has got complete trust and confidence in the car. He has been massively fast all weekend. Unfortunately a reliability issue has cost him a race win this weekend, but he will be back very strong in a week’s time.”

Horner, talking to Autosport, dismissed the idea that the brake failure was a recurrence of Red Bull’s vulnerability from last year, where unreliability arguably cost Sebastian Vettel the world championship.

“I don’t think we’ve ever seen this failure before. We need to understand it first,” he said. “The pit stop execution was strong and other teams will have other issues at different points of the year. We haven’t had one driver go out and dominate, the dominant car so far is ours and it is important that in one race’s time we score some big points.”

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