F1 News: Red Bull Boss Calls Out Mercedes For "Failed" Concept And "Dramatic" Toto Wolff

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner expressed surprise when Mercedes announced the W14 F1 car for 2023, which was a 'carried forward' version of a failed W13 car concept. He also expected Ferrari to be in better shape this year, considering the pace the car carried last year.

Throughout the entirety of the ground effect era beginning 2022, Mercedes faced challenges with its car. In 2023, the team persisted with a similar car, only to abandon the 'Zeropod' concept, as experiments with the car yielded no tangible results.

The same could be said about Ferrari, who abandoned its concept this year to follow the Red Bull route on its car, which showed positive results as upgrades came in. However, Horner was surprised that both rival teams did not ditch their concepts in the winter of 2022.

When Horner was asked if his team was relieved that Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff had announced the abandonment of its car's concept at the beginning of the 2023 season, he said:

“Well, Toto [Wolff] tends to be a little dramatic anyway.

“I think what surprised us was that Ferrari had a very good car last year. And the natural evolution of that we expected it to be a very tight contender this year.

“We were very surprised to see Mercedes sticking with the concepts that had clearly failed the previous year.

“If you looked around the cars in pre-season, the cars that were closest in concept to us were the Aston Martin and McLaren.”

Horner emphasized that Red Bull was unaware of having produced a championship-winning car capable of dominating the season from the outset, even though they successfully attained a substantial weight advantage over their 2022 challenger. He added:

“Certainly, coming out of Bahrain, we felt like, ‘we've got a really good package here’. But we didn't know whether it was circuit specific – temperature, conditions, asphalt.

“So, it's only when you've had a sample of two or three and you've gone to a couple of circuits that have been more troublesome, certainly for us the previous year, like Melbourne for example, that suddenly you're thinking, 'ok, no, this is really together'.

“And so yeah, it takes a sample of a few races to get a clear overview. Nobody was coming out of Bahrain getting too carried away.”