Christian Horner predicting “classic season” in 2020 between the top three

Aston Martin Red Bull Racing boss Christian Horner believes that the 2020 Formula 1 season will be a “classic”, expecting a tight battle with Mercedes and Ferrari due to the continuity of drivers and regulations.

The changes between the 2019 and 2020 F1 seasons are very minimal that the performance levels of teams at the end of last year will more or less be replicated, even with a new car.
 
Despite Ferrari looking like the favourites during winter testing a year ago Mercedes went on to dominate the first half of the season, with the Scuderia and Red Bull catching up in the second half, making it a very close contest for wins.
 
“We’ve got continuity across all aspects of next year with drivers, with regulations, with engine supply, engine regulation,” Horner said to Motorsport.com.

“So unless somebody pulls a rabbit out of a hat, then I think we’re set for a really exciting year next year between, Mercedes, Ferrari, ourselves.

“And it could be a real classic season.”

The Briton added that the changes made to the front wing from the end of 2018 affected the start of their 2019, along with different tyres and their switch from Renault engines to Honda.

“The front wing regulation change, and the tyre change over the winter seemed to affect us perhaps more than our opponents,” he added.

“And of course also, at that time we were still catching up on from the power perspective.

“But I think from Austria onwards, we really got on top of that and the second half of the year for us has been very competitive.

“I mean, if I look back to 2017, we had a fantastic car at the start of the year, we should have been on the front row in Melbourne, we won the second race in China.

“We had a very, very competitive car, the beginning of ‘17. And again, that was with stability of regulations, and I think we have that again from 2019 into ‘20.

“You can’t gauge what others are doing. But hopefully, theoretically, the Melbourne [‘20] car will be an upgrade of the Abu Dhabi [‘19] car.”