Christian Horner and Red Bull mantra for 2025: how engineers are working to “widen operating window”. Christian Horner explains the real goal of the new F1 season for Red Bull.

The difficulties of the RB20
Max Verstappen’s F1 Drivers’ Championship victory has only partially overshadowed Red Bull’s difficulties in 2024. After a super start, which seemed to indicate that the rest of the season would follow the pattern of the previous year, technical problems with the RB20 gradually came to light. The main cause appears to be an update introduced during the Imola weekend, which then “threw off” the engineers, further unbalancing a car that had seemed (almost) unbeatable up until that point. Thus, Red Bull team principal Christian Horner explains that the main goal with the RB21 is not so much to improve performance but to make the new car easier to handle.

Christian Horner and Red Bull’s 2025 goal
“We understood well,” Christian Horner explained, as quoted by the American magazine Racer, “where the development wasn’t optimal. In Imola, we introduced an update that made the car much faster, but with a very narrow operating window. When we managed to get into that window, we were really competitive, but when we deviated even a little, the car became problematic. Max was able to work around the issues, but the fact that the operating window was so narrow I believe particularly affected Checo.” Not surprisingly, due to poor results throughout the season, the Mexican driver Sergio Perez was replaced at the end of the year by young Liam Lawson.

Red Bull’s goal for 2025 is therefore clearly not to make the car faster but to “widen the window.” That is, to increase the combinations of setup, circuit characteristics, and environmental and asphalt temperatures in which the car can perform at its best. “The engineers,” Horner added, “have focused a lot on how to widen this window during the winter. Not necessarily adding definitive performance, but simply expanding the window. The breakthrough in Qatar, with pole and victory, once again shows that we are on the right track. But none of our rivals will stand still, and nothing can be taken for granted. However, I think we’ve started to understand some of the problems.”