Horner: RBR yet to realise full potential

Sebastian Vettel has moved into third place in the standings after winning the Chinese Grand Prix and finishing second in Bahrain.

The Shanghai victory was the first for Red Bull Racing, but championship leader Jenson Button reckons the Milton Keynes-based squad is now the team to beat despite the Brawn driver having won the last race at Sakhir.

Red Bull is yet to introduce a double-decker diffuser, as well as other updates, and Horner reckons there is still a lot of potential to be realised.

"I think that we have got a good car," said Horner. "We have got a lot of developments to come and we still have the double-diffuser to look forward to.

"So it is still early days, but we have clearly demonstrated in wet and dry conditions now what our potential is."

Horner added that is convinced Vettel could have won the Bahrain Grand Prix last Sunday if he hadn't been stuck behind Lewis Hamilton and Jarno Trulli for several laps.

"You will see on the race plot that we would have followed Jenson, and we had the overlap of about three or four laps on each stint," he added. "So I think we would have jumped him at the stop. It was hard to follow other cars as well, as it was doing quite a lot of damage to the tyres.

"We could see we had the pace, but well done to Jenson for making his opportunity work for him."

He added: "Toyota tried a different strategy, but we were very happy on the option. Sebastian was trying to look after them the best he could, behind Trulli and Hamilton. He did a brilliant job of doing that, so he could exploit the benefit from them in free air.

"Then on the prime at the end we had no real problem. We went out the pits 14 seconds behind the Brawn and with three laps to go we had closed it down to about nine seconds. Then obviously they turned their engines down."