Christian Horner believes more penalties will come to Red Bull during the rest of the season, admitting Monza was just the start.
Daniel Ricciardo faced a 20 engine Penalty that saw him start at 16 and ended at an impressive 4th.
Max Verstappen qualified at 2 but due to his 15 place grid penalty, he started at 13thplace and ended the race at 10th. Despite an incredible qualifying performance, both of them did not start at the top of the grid.
And Horner says this is just the start for the penalties as the team has used up all their allocation.
Talking to AutoSport Horner said “We are for sure going to incur a further penalty,”
“I hope we have the choice strategically where we take that penalty, but it is not likely we will get to the end of the year without incurring another penalty.”
The Italian GP penalties were taken partly due to their engine’s reliability issues. Horner says Renault is working on improving the engines and the engine maker has even deployed more personnel to Red Bull to help ease the situation.
“They have certainly responded, which is encouraging,” he said.
“But the problem is, they were new engines in Monza, so if we would have had an issue with the first engine in its cycle it would have been fairly catastrophic.
“The encouraging thing is that they seem to be taking it seriously.
“They are not putting their head in the sand and hopefully that will follow an upward trend between now and the end of the year.”
The team decided to take the massive penalty because they know from experience Red Bull cars can do better at the Singapore’s Marina Bay track than Monza. Hence the team changed all potential faulty engine parts before Monza and took a penalty hit at the Italian GP.
Last year Ricciardo came second in the Singapore GP, 0.48 seconds behind the winner Sebastian Vettel, while Verstappen came in sixth. With Ricciardo’s current form, it will not be surprising if he wins at Marina Bay track.
