Christian Horner praises Mark Webber’s Malaysian Grand Prix performance – Formula 1 news
Red Bull Racing team principal Christian Horner recently praised Mark Webber’s performance as the Aussie finished in 4th place at the 2011 Malaysian Grand Prix after a disappointing start to the 2011 Formula 1 season in Australia.
Mark finished in 5th place behind Fernando Alonso even though his teammate had an almost one second advantage over the rest of the drivers in terms of pace according to the qualifying session results of the Australian Grand Prix.
However, Webber improved on his performance this past weekend and as a result, his boss praised his performance.
The team used the Kinetic Energy Recovery System for the first time this past weekend but Mark went through a major problem with his system during the formation lap of the race. After the start of the race, Webber fell behind in terms of track position as
his car was having some major issues.
“Mark was unlucky at the start. He sort of had the worst of all worlds. The KERS went in to safe mode, an electrical issue we haven't seen before,” stated the team boss.
However, the Aussie made his way up and scored some valuable points for his team. One has to admit that the team came up with a very clever strategy in order to deal with this problem and enable Mark to perform at his best.
“He (Mark Webber) had the combination of a bad start and no KERS at the second longest run (of all the F1 circuits) to the first corner, and not a great first lap where he lost another place to [Kamui] Kobayashi,” said Christian.
It was a great run by Webber as he made his way up the grid from 10th place and Horner later on revealed that the team decided to go aggressive with him deliberately in order to get the best out of him and went with a four-stop strategy.
Mark needed to make this strategy work and he was spot on. The Red Bull driver made a great recovery and the main reason for his successful recovery was a combination of performance and strategy according to Horner.
On the other hand, his teammate Sebastian Vettel had a perfect race yet again as he scored the pole position during the qualifying session to start the race in first place on the grid before winning the race comfortably.
Nevertheless, Horner revealed that the Aussie is a bit disappointed with his results but added that ruling him out is out of the question at the moment as he still has the ability to surprise everyone and score some good points consistently.
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