Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has expressed his “surprise” at gains he says Mercedes have made with their engine performance. Mercedes reject Red Bull’s claims, saying nothing has changed in their engine apart from fitting a new one to Hamilton’s car for last weekend’s Turkish Grand Prix. Red Bull made an apparent step forward in performance around the time of the French Grand Prix in early summer, and Hamilton publicly questioned how they had been able to do that. Horner added that reliability problems with the Mercedes engine could also be affecting impressions of performance. Mercedes F1 boss Toto Wolff admitted the company were managing reliability against performance with their engines. Over the first half of the season, Red Bull had an average advantage in qualifying of 0.026%.

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