Red Bull may only end up fighting to be ‘best of the rest’

Red Bull risk being dragged into a titanic battle for ‘best of the rest’ rather than the title if they do not fix their reliability woes.

It has been a mixed start to the 2022 campaign for Christian Horner and co to say the least.

On one hand, they have one win, one pole position and two podium finishes to their name, and in terms of outright pace they have been comfortably ahead of everyone but Ferrari.

However, things could and should have gone even better, with Max Verstappen retiring from P2 twice and Sergio Perez retiring from P4 once. All three DNFs were caused by mechanical failures.

Nevertheless, Horner did not seem too concerned after seeing the Dutchman fail to reach the finish in Australia, claiming he would “rather fix a fast car than try to make a reliable and slow one fast” in a not-so-subtle dig at Mercedes.

If the RB18 cannot be fixed soon though, his and his team’s outlook will become much less sunny.

Red Bull are no strangers to reliability problems, having faced them regularly in the hybrid era before switching from Renault to Honda engines, and the team principal’s claim that it is better to have problems in that department rather than outright pace may have been true back then.

For instance, despite the fact Red Bull had one car fail to make the finish in 13 of the 20 rounds in 2017, they still took P3 in the Constructors’ Championship comfortably.

It was a similar story the following year. In that campaign, they suffered 12 retirements but again finished in P3, much closer to the top two than to anyone behind them.

Although, for a team aiming for wins and titles, those seasons were disappointing for them, they were not exactly disasters in terms of the final position in the standings all things