Christian Horner reacts after Red Bull’s secret exposed in Monaco

Red Bull boss Christian Horner does not seem overly concerned that F1 rivals have now had a closer look at the RB19 floor – courtesy of Sergio Perez.

Perez’s costly crash in Q1 ahead of the Monaco Grand Prix triggered a crane to remove the RB19 from the streets of Monte Carlo, providing the entire F1 paddock with a golden opportunity to snap away at the floor as it was lifted up.

The underside of the floor is, by placement, a very difficult area of the car for rival F1 teams to spy on – but everyone has now had a rare glimpse of the intricate design mapped out by Adrian Newey and Co which has contributed to Red Bull’s continued runaway success in F1.

But, Horner believes that Perez hasn’t given too much information away to their rivals as he suspects intel would have been gathered long before the Mexican driver’s crash in Monaco.

“It’s very rude to look up people’s skirts really,” Horner joked to reporters in Monte Carlo, as quoted by Motorsport.com.

“Pictures of floors get taken in and around the paddock.

“They arrive in vans, they work with the cars and the shutters are up and so on, and each team will be employing spy photographers to get pictures of the cars when they’re in parts and pieces. That’s common practice.

“So I wouldn’t have thought it was the first time a picture of the floor has been taken.

“It was probably the first time it has been suspended from a crane, but all teams are always striving for that intelligence.”

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It wasn’t just Sergio Perez who gave the rest of the F1 paddock a glimpse of Red Bull’s delicate areas, as Lewis Hamilton did the same with the upgraded Mercedes W14 when he crashed out in the closing stages of FP3 earlier on Saturday.

Toto Wolff, like Horner, also saw the funny side of revealing such valuable information.

“Well, whoever performed the crane has probably worked for Cirque du Soleil,” said Wolff with a smile, as per Autosport.

“Honestly, that I don’t even comprehend. The car was on the road.

“You could have put it on a truck. You’re showcasing a car to everyone in the world.

“That was sub-optimum for us, to say the least.”

The resulting photographs which were taken as a result of the respective crashes for Perez and Hamilton had Sky F1’s Ted Kravitz, as well as many others, salivating over the design philosophies on show.

Kravitz’s brutal assessment was that the new Mercedes floor looked “prehistoric” compared to its Red Bull counterpart.