“Not really paying a great deal of attention”- Red Bull on Max Verstappen to Mercedes

“Not really paying a great deal of attention”- Red Bull boss Christian Horner claims that his team ignores Mercedes rumours.

With Lewis Hamilton signing only a year-long contract extension with Mercedes, it has been speculated that Max Verstappen would be moving onto Mercedes anytime soon.

However, Red Bull boss Christian Horner has said that his team isn’t paying any attention to these reports and working on their objective for the 2021 season.

“The most important thing for us is to concern ourselves with what we’re doing. And it’s enormously important for ourselves, and obviously, Max, to build on the potential we’ve shown. That’s our objective,” he said to the Autosport.

“I’m not really paying a great deal of attention to speculation. It’s: ‘we need to control the things that we have at our disposal, and we need to maximise our own performance’, which is absolutely our combined objective for this year.”

While Red Bull may not be paying any attention to Mercedes’ rumours, but Max’s father, Jos Verstappen, has constantly criticized Red Bull for its 2020 car and subtly backed his son’s move to Mercedes.

Working under COVID-19 restrictions is tolling.

Horner then talked about the technical difficulties over working under pandemic restrictions, as the team developed a car for 2021 while maintaining the COVID-19 bubble.

“It’s been busy. The team have done a great job working around the challenges that we’ve faced. Generally, I think we’re in reasonable shape. I think we’ve been assisted by the fact that there’s a large percentage of the regulations that are carried over, which is unusual.”

“We’ve been fortunate; we’ve had very few people affected with corona,” he said. “And we’re also fortunate that we have a large site that we’ve been able to spread people out [around Red Bull’s Milton Keynes base].

“But, of course, we’ve had a combination in that manufacturing function has largely remained intact, and the designer and support functions have either been working on a rotational basis or working from working from home.”

About the author

Tanish Chachra

Tanish Chachra is the Motorsport editor at The SportsRush. He saw his first race when F1 visited India in 2011, and since then, his romance with the sport has been seasonal until he took up this role in 2020. Reigniting F1's coverage on this site, Tanish has fallen in love with the sport all over again. He loves Kimi Raikkonen and sees a future world champion in Oscar Piastri. Away from us, he loves to snuggle inside his books.

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