Horner praises McLaren amidst cooling controversies: 'Doing a good job of that'

It's been a rather controversial matter as of late, with a supposed Red Bull investigation into McLaren's temperature control effectiveness, prompting a back and forth between the Woking-based team's CEO Zak Brown, and his Red Bull counterpart, Horner, with the latter having the last say in the matter - so far - stating that this was 'part and parcel of Formula One.'

Speaking after the race, however, Horner praised McLaren and compared the advantage the papay team have today to the lead the Austrians had over the rest of the field in the 2023 F1 season.

"McLaren are the standout car, they had the kind of advantage that we saw a couple of years ago and they're obviously doing a very good job in managing temperatures and particularly I think if you look at the medium stint there, at the end of the medium tyre stint, that was probably where they were the most competitive," said Horner to media like GPblog after the race in Miami.

Verstappen did indeed complain of his braking performance which were marked clearly by the times the Dutchman locked up and went straight on, like when McLaren driver Oscar Piastri managed to overtake him, for instance. This only caused the temperatures in his brakes and tyres to go up even more.

So, Red Bull have the pace to fight McLaren, they just lack the temperature control efficiency the papaya team has, to be able to take the challenge to them more consistently.

During qualifying, as Verstappen has made evident, Red Bull can indeed fight, and when they do, Verstappen usually comes out ahead.

"I think that theoretically if they'd have put their theoreticals together in qualy yesterday they should have been ahead of us," concluded Horner.