Christian Horner's honest verdict on Red Bull’s F1 title chances in 2025

Christian Horner is not ruling out Red Bull from the Formula 1 title fight despite a slow start to the 2025 season in Australia and China.

Despite devoting significant resources to fixing the balance issues that plagued its 2024 F1 challenger, the RB21 has proved to be incredibly difficult car to drive while also being slower than the pacesetting McLaren MCL39.

Reigning world champion Max Verstappen finished second and fourth in the opening two races of the year, while new teammate Liam Lawson failed to muster a single point.

In total, Red Bull has scored fewer than half the points of runaway leader McLaren, putting the Milton Keynes-based team already on the back foot in the constructors’ title.

However, Horner believes the championship is not already out of Red Bull’s reach, citing McLaren’s impressive surge in performance in 2024 as proof that things can change quickly in F1.

But the Briton did stress that Red Bull needs both cars to continuously score points to clinch its first constructors’ championship since 2023 and seventh overall.

“Look, you never say never,” Horner told F1’s official website.

“I think the one thing McLaren proved to everybody last year is you can have a troubled start to the year but still be very competitive. We’re eight points behind in the drivers’ [standings].

“The [Teams’] championship is a very tough ask, and we need to make significant progress with the car in order to even challenge for that. You have to have two cars scoring, that obviously hurt us badly last year [when Sergio Perez was in the second seat].

“We have to have two cars in there, and even to compete for the drivers’, you’ve got to have another car in play. It’s vitally important for the team to ensure that we have both drivers running as close to the front as we can.”

Verstappen romped to a fourth consecutive drivers’ title in 2024 after successfully overcoming the RB20’s balance issues, but Perez’s lack of results after the first quarter of the season cost the team the constructors’ title to McLaren.

Red Bull subsequently chose to terminate its contract with Perez and bring in its long-time protege Lawson into the second seat, but the Kiwi was so far off the pace in Australia and China that the team is reportedly considering replacing him as early as the next round in Japan.

Red Bull is also having to pay attention to fixing its troubled F1 car, with Verstappen claiming that even Racing Bulls’ VCARB 02 is easier to drive than the RB21.

Asked how Red Bull can turn things around, Horner said: “In the end there are 400 engineers in our team who are all trawling through the 600 sensors that are on the car, so there’s an awful lot of information that we have.”