USA GP: ‘Team effort’ wins title for Red Bull

Red Bull went into the race needing a maximum of four points to secure their third Constructors’ Championship in three years. And while the result did not look entirely secure when Mark Webber retired and both Ferraris advanced to the front, at the end ultimate victory was comfortable for the team from Milton Keynes.

“It’s incredible for the whole team to have won a third consecutive World Championship,” said team principal Christian Horner. “The Constructors’ is what we use to measure ourselves against our competitors and, for every member of the team, it’s how we gauge our performance. The Drivers’ obviously has the prestige and public following but within the team they carry equal importance. So, to have achieved a consecutive third World Championship, which only three other teams in the history of the sport have achieved, puts us into a very elite group and having done it in such a short space of time is testimony to all the members of the team. That’s all the hard work, the long hours and dedication from every department. It’s a very proud moment for every single member of the team and Red Bull.”

The elite group to which Horner refers numbers Ferrari, who won the title 1975-77 and 2000-04, McLaren 1988-90 and Williams 1992-94, the latter including the design talents of Red Bull’s current chief technical officer Adrian Newey.

“It’s been an amazing year,” said Newey. “To achieve the hat-trick is a tremendous tribute to the whole team. It shows we’ve managed to keep our standards up and keep consistency. The hard work, the dedication, the talent of the people back in Milton Keynes – that’s what this is all about. I hope they are celebrating and having a drink tonight. We are always thinking how we can improve the car and what we can do in the coming races.”

Red Bull Racing won their first Championship at the penultimate race of 2010 but accelerated away from the competition in 2011, winning the title with three races to spare. Though they have again won the Constructors’ Championship with a comfortable margin, undoubtedly this season has been a sterner challenge.

“It’s been a difficult year and unfortunately my pre-season concerns proved to be right,” adds Newey. “Having developed the car around side exhaust technology for the last two years, losing that was a bigger step back for us than our competitors and it’s been quite a difficult evolution to get the car back to where we wanted. Getting a third title shows we’re not a flash in the pan; we’ve managed to stay at the top, to understand the car and maintain consistency, which is not easy at all. 

“The first title was amazing because when I left McLaren for Red Bull, it was a bit of a career gamble, I was joining with a dream of perhaps trying to win races in the future with the team that I’d been involved with more or less from the start. To actually fulfil that dream and to achieve three titles has been amazing. We can all have dreams, but to do it is something special. It’s not just me personally but it’s the whole team and this is a tribute to everyone within it.”

While Sebastian Vettel leads the Drivers’ Championship, Mark Webber outscored the German in the first half of the year and was ahead of his team-mate going into the summer break. “A third Constructors’ for the team is an incredible achievement,” said Webber, who retired from today’s US Grand Prix with an alternator failure. “Three years in a row is something that I think all of us would never have envisaged when we first started to be successful, so the results that we’ve had over the years is really astonishing. This Championship was probably the toughest one so far, for lots of different reasons and – it’s a cliché – but it’s been a real team effort.”