Red Bull updates on progress: 'Team is in pretty good shape'

"It has been an intense winter, with the whole COVID situation as well," Horner began to tell Autosport magazine. The outbreak of the British corona variant in the UK has caused additional trials for the Austrian racing team. "The team have done a great job working around the challenges that we’ve faced."

Regulations postponed

A major benefit for Red Bull and the other Formula One teams has been that the new regulations have been postponed until 2022. This year's cars are pretty much the same as last season's and that's a good thing. Otherwise the task would have been much greater.

This is especially true for teams like AlphaTauri. They are based in Faenza, Italy, but use the wind tunnel which is located in the UK. That's not easy now with all the entry restrictions, let alone having to build a completely new car.

Red Bull well on its way

“We’ve been assisted by the fact that there’s a large percentage of the regulations that are carried over, which is unusual. But generally, I think the team is in pretty good shape," Horner said. Red Bull initially missed the mark in 2020 because the correlation with the wind tunnel was not there. The team of Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez now knows much better what the areas for improvement actually are. "So, we learned a lot during 2020. And, of course, the challenge now is to apply that in 2021."