"Glass half full" after Verstappen's missed British GP victory chance - Horner
"Glass half full" after Verstappen's missed British GP victory chance - Horner
Ian Parkes & Nicolas Quarles van Ufford
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has insisted he "can't be upset" with the end result of Sunday's British Grand Prix after Lewis Hamilton's wounded Mercedes narrowly beat Max Verstappen to take the chequered flag.
Verstappen had crucially pitted on the penultimate lap of the race at Silverstone in order to get the bonus point for the fastest lap, with Hamilton seemingly out of sight in the lead.
With half a lap remaining the six-time F1 champion's front-left tyre began to delaminate, but with his lead to Verstappen over half a minute, it gave him just enough of a buffer to limp home on three wheels.
In hindsight, Verstappen's second pitstop to obtain the bonus point proved a costly mistake, although Horner has countered it was not as straightforward as that.
"You can either look at the glass being half empty or half full," said Horner. "We’ve benefitted from [Valtteri] Bottas’ issues even when they had a quicker car than us.
"We very nearly had the same issues ourselves. If Hamilton had had the issue a lap before we’d all be patting ourselves on the back.
"It’s never good to benefit from others’ misfortune but I don’t think we can be upset with what happened."
With his second-place finish on Sunday being his third consecutive podium, Verstappen is now just six points behind current championship runner-up Bottas despite suffering a DNF in Austria in the season opener.
Despite the Dutchman's impressive showings, Horner knows Mercedes still has the most competitive package by some margin.
"We need to find more performance because they simply are just quicker than us at the moment," added Horner.
"Yes, if we’re being sharp on strategy and with his [Verstappen's] racecraft we can keep ourselves in the mix but on outright pace obviously they have a very dominant car at the moment. We need to try and close that gap."
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