“Having lost the race a couple of years prior to that – when we screwed up by not having the right tyres in the pit lane for him – that was an incredible moment, and that just felt like the universe is correcting itself by him achieving that win.”
Looking back at Ricciardo’s first season with Red Bull, Horner admits that the squad were unsure about his overtaking skills – only to quickly have their concerns allayed when the driver from Perth started racing for the team.
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“I think that some of the races, if you look at Hungary 2014… Our biggest concern when he came to drive for us was that we knew he was quick, but [we’d] never seen him overtake anybody, so we didn’t know how good a racer he was,” Horner explained.
“As soon as he got in our car, he just never stopped overtaking people! He was so late on the brakes. If you look at that race from 2014 in Hungary, if you look at his first victory in Montreal, the race he won in China in 2018 I think it was.