23 May 2023 , 06:00
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Damon Hill has no problem with Christian Horner questioning why his Red Bull team is being given no competition this season.
We may only be five races into the 2023 Formula 1 season, but it's pretty clear who will win the constructors' title this year. Red Bull have won on every single outing so far – comfortably – with the performance gap to all their rivals even greater than the likes of Mercedes and Ferrari might have feared.
Both those teams have been leapfrogged by Aston Martin who have made great strides and sit second in the championship. But the gap to Red Bull is already at 122 points and will almost certainly continue to grow – with even team boss Horner surprised at just how little competition his team is getting.
"Where are the others?" he asked in his TV interview with a slightly bewildered tone after the last race in Miami. While some accused the Red Bull chief of gloating, 1996 world champion Hill feels Horner has every right to be questioning how the usual suspects are so far off the pace.
"Christian is someone who likes to rub salt in the wounds – he doesn't tend to say things without knowing the impact of his words," said the pundit on the Sky Sports F1 podcast. "But saying that everyone else has underperformed, he's right.
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"Red Bull, that team has produced an absolute peach of a car. They've exploited whatever loopholes there are in the regulations so that it's a legal car that is beautifully put together. I was watching Max [Verstappen] in Miami drive that thing and thinking, 'That guy can do anything with that car'. It's so beautifully balanced. But everyone else has underperformed, he's right."
Damon Hill thinks Horner has every right to question his team's rivals (Sky Sports)Meanwhile, Hill's former Sky colleague Johnny Herbert has heard the things that Horner said before, from the mouth of his Mercedes counterpart. He said on his podcast: "I remember Toto Wolff saying exactly the same thing when they were having their domination period so it's a typical cocky comment, I suppose.
"You know you've got a good car and you know no one else has got a chance of beating you. And, actually, both of them were right when they mentioned those similar things. Where is everybody else? They're right because you would expect – like the updates that came for Ferrari – you expected them to do something.
"But they didn't do anything and the race pace again was lousy. Really, really poor. So there's a lot of head-scratching going on and I think there's some head-scratching from Christian as well. 'Why aren't the other teams able to challenge us?' We're a few races into the season, but nobody has closed the gap."