The car with which
Red Bull Racing will hope to defend its two F1 championship crowns is running behind time, according to team principal Christian Horner.
The Milton Keynes-based team puts the delay down to its focus on retaining both the constructor and individual titles in a fraught end to the 2012 campaign, but is confident that the work being put in behind the scenes now will pay dividends when its renews hostilities with Ferrari,
McLaren et al next season.
“For sure, knowing Adrian, it's going to be late,” Horner quipped while appearing with
Sebastian Vettel and designer Adrian Newey on Red Bull's
ServusTV, “It's late in design, but the people in Milton Keynes are working tremendously hard.”
Horner confirmed that, with few rule changes to be concerned by, the 2013 car would be largely based on this year's successful RB8, but that the design team would be looking to extract the maximum performance from it ahead of winter testing.
“It's an evolution because the regulation are reasonably stable,” he emphasised, “But the dangerous thing in F1 is to underestimate your rivals and Ferrari, McLaren, Mercedes-Benz and Lotus, as we saw this year, are massively strong teams, and very motivated.
“We've managed to achieve some wonderful things over the last three years, and we'll be determined to retain the trophies we've worked hard to achieve, but we can take nothing for granted and that'll play a large part in our motivation going into 2013.”
Newey confirmed that the pressure to keep Vettel in the title hunt right to the final round of 2012 had taken his eye off the progress being made on next year's project.
“This year was the toughest fight I've been involved in,” he admitted, “and not only due to the length [of the season] and the number of races we had to do.
“In 2010, we had a very fast car, but reliability problems meant that the drivers' title went down to the last race. Last year, we could take nothing for granted, but could take things a little easier because we had pace and reliability. This year was different. The car showed flashes of pace – Sebastian won in Bahrain and
Mark Webber in Monaco – but we didn't have the level of consistency that we wanted.