Christian Horner believes McLaren will have learned from its “missed opportunities” in F1 2024, as Lando Norris aims to win his first Drivers’ Championship.

With McLaren having arguably the fastest and most consistent car of the 2024 season, the British team won its first Constructors’ Championship since 1998, but Lando Norris was unable to topple Max Verstappen from his perch.

Christian Horner “sure” McLaren will be back

Red Bull’s dominant start to the 2024 season allowed Verstappen to open up a strong points lead in the Drivers’ Championship, with the Dutch driver then doing his utmost to maintain his lead as Norris came back strongly in the middle phase of the season.

With Red Bull’s RB20 also falling off the boil as the team went through some development struggles, a step back to introduce a revised floor at the United States Grand Prix brought the Milton Keynes-based team back into contention with Verstappen winning the Sprint race in Austin – his first victory of any kind since the summer’s Spanish Grand Prix.

Grand Prix wins in Brazil and Qatar showed the RB20 was back in a much more competitive window, although the team was powerless to stop McLaren from winning the Constructors’ Championship.

With Sergio Perez struggling to score points in the second Red Bull, McLaren’s more evenly-matched pairing of Norris and Oscar Piastri came out on top, while Ferrari relegated Red Bull to third as Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz helped the Scuderia to the runner-up spot.

Given it was McLaren’s first year back in contention for a title for over a decade, it was perhaps no surprise that, on occasion, the Woking-based squad made some strategic fumbles or displayed a slight lack of operational sharpness in contrast to Red Bull – an example being at the Canadian Grand Prix, when Red Bull decisively pulled Verstappen into the pits a lap earlier than Norris and regained the lead of a race Norris had been dominating.

With the McLaren MCL38 often showing a clean pair of heels to Verstappen, only to sometimes give an opportunity back to Red Bull, team boss Christian Horner said he expects McLaren to have learned lessons from these fumbles and to come back stronger in F1 2025.

“I think, when you reflect on it, they missed a lot of opportunities on the driver’s side [last] year,” he told PlanetF1.com in an exclusive interview.

“They had two competitive drivers, which was strong for them in the Constructors’.

“But I’m sure Lando will perhaps look back and think three or four wins from this campaign, with the car that he had at many races, is probably less than they could have.

“But I’m sure they’ll come back. They’ll learn from that, for sure.”

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A key factor in the close championship fight was Red Bull’s operational sharpness, with the reigning Champions making fewer mistakes than McLaren. Coming off the back of two consecutive Constructors’ Championships, Red Bull had been a constant thorn in the side of Mercedes in the years prior.

Going back even further, Red Bull’s lean years between 2014 and ’20 still saw the team fighting for victories with an uncompetitive Renault engine and in the early years of its Honda partnership.

It was through these tougher periods that Horner believes his team developed the scrappiness needed to earn results that, sometimes, it didn’t merit on pure performance.

“I think that’s always been the strength of this team – that we are an out-and-out race team,” he said.

“That’s always been a part of the philosophy that I’ve instilled since the very beginning.

“When I came in 2005, ‘Let’s focus on maximizing our chances and opportunities and punch above our weight where we can’

“It has always been our ethos. We went through some hardened years from 2010 to ’13, and then we went through difficult years from ’14 onwards, but we were still winning races when the occasion allowed.

“There was that determination, grit, and race sharpness within the team that has always enabled us to maximise our results.”

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