Wanting to win

It's natural in competetive sport that a team wants to win. Trouble is, all the other teams want to win too. So the announcement that Christian Horner, boss of RedBull Racing, expects to be challenging for wins in 2008 doesn't fill me with excitement.

I understand that it's probably just expectation management, and what he's really saying is that he doesn't expect to be winning in 2006, or 2007 for that matter. Because even though he has just signed probably the most successful designer of all time, it takes an amazing amount to win in F1. I find it hard to believe that Red Bull will commit the same amount of cash to racing as, say, Toyota. And Toyota have been trying for four years now to get to the top spot of the podium but still haven't manged it. They've lead races, and had pole positions, but being in front of the end of the race is something else. It requires everything in the team to be right.

Even Ferrari had an amazingly long drought back in the 80s, and it's likely that the once all-conquering Williams team will struggle for the next couple of seasons.  Put it this way; only five of the current teams have ever won a race and it doesn't look likely that Midland (née Jordan) are going to be troubling the scorers again. So that just leaves the usual suspects: Ferrari, McLaren and Renault.  Honda and Toyota will be knocking at the door, and you have to assume that BMW will make progress by 2008 too.

So for Red Bull to win a race, they have to beat all of these teams. And they have to do it with an engine that they're buying from someone else. I honestly can't see it happening, but I am really glad they're going to give it a go.