Horner: We went from a two-stop strategy to one

Max Verstappen confidently won the French Grand Prix after Charles Leclerc crashed his car. Red Bull Racing head Christian Horner believes Max would have won even without the Ferrari driver’s relegation.

Christian Horner: “Of course, after the failure of Charles and his retirement, the race turned out to be quite easy for Max. We did the “cutting” as soon as we realized we had a chance to pass the race with one pit stop.

In the race the degradation of the rubber was lower than expected. Initially we leaned towards the strategy of two pit stops, but as the situation progressed we decided to switch to one pit stop. On lap fifteen we saw a backlog on the track that Max could come back to after a stop, he attacked to gain time and then only had to keep an eye on the tyres.

After Charles crashed the car, the safety car pulled onto the track and everyone got a chance to make a “free” pit stop. We were lucky that Max had enough time to be on track in front of the two Mercedes drivers after their stops. After that he had a lot of control over the race.”

Horner also commented on the situation with the end of the virtual safety car at the end of the race, when Sergio Perez missed George Russell in third place: “This weekend Sergio had more problems with rubber degradation than before, but he was the most upset by the problem with the virtual safety car.

Race management was unable to disable this mode on the first try, so they had to restart it. Sergio said his machine was not receiving any information about the time delta. It is good that Sergio has stayed in the delta. As for George, I believe he either avoided this situation or different information was sent to his car and to Sergio’s car.

The reasons must be investigated. What happened is disturbing because I believe Sergio had the pace to get on the podium with two cars. In any case, in the race we earned important points in both standings of the championship.