Red Bull team principal Christian Horner revealed the best victory of all time the team has secured in F1.
While many anticipated it’d be Max Verstappen and the Abu Dhabi dramatic end moment moves, Horner actually chose something else. The Red Bull boss instead reveals the driver he believes achieved the best victory for the team.
Horner has named Sebastian Vettel’s dramatic victory at the 2010 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix as the team’s best-ever win in F1.
While everyone expected Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso to take another victory; the Spaniard came up short by four points. Ultimately, that season changed everything as the Vettel dominance began.
Vettel secured his first Formula 1 championship by winning from pole position in the dramatic season finale. While Alonso just needed fourth place to win the drivers’ title, his aspirations of becoming a three-time world champion were crushed as he came in seventh place behind Vitaly Petrov.
With his victory against Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton, who had a small chance of winning the championship, the 23-year-old German became the sport’s youngest champion.
“Best win? Probably because it was completely against the odds was Sebastian winning the last race in Abu Dhabi. Because he hadn’t led the championship at all that year in 2010,” Horner said during a recent appearance at the Cambridge Union.
“And Fernando Alonso was the favourite to win that championship, that race. And literally against the odds, um, Sebastian won, and where Fernando finished and Mark finished behind him was enough for him to become the world champion. So it was completely against the odds.”
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Verstappen and Vettel are ‘totally different’
The British team boss was further asked about how the four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel compares to the current star driver Max Verstappen, who won the F1 championship last year after beating out Lewis Hamilton in a fierce battle.
The Red Bull chief begins by describing his experiences with Vettel. According to Horner, the German always worked with extreme precision and concerned himself with every part of the car.
“They are totally different,” explained Horner. “Sebastian is very meticulous, into every element of data, every aspect of what’s going on with the car, every component on the car.”
“He often would be the last to leave the circuit, and he debriefs… it would take him half an hour just to explain the formation lap, let alone the race. “
In comparison, Horner said that things are currently a lot less complicated and drawn out with his Dutch driver. “Max is much more simplistic, he just has this very raw talent and he’s the hungriest driver I’ve ever come across. He just wants to win,”
“He’ll give you very straightforward feedback, is very straightforward to his race engineer. They are like an old married couple at times.
“But you know every lap he’s going to give you 110%. And he demands the same from the team.
“So, they are very different personalities, very different characters. But I would say the one thing they do have in common, is their ambition.”
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