Red Bull won Monaco GP by “thinking on our feet”

Having qualified third,  Sergio Perez scored a brilliant victory on the streets of the principality.

The Mexican jumped ahead of the Ferraris of Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc with good strategy calls around his pitstops on the drying track, and then nursed his graining slick tyres in the closing laps.

His teammate Max Verstappen moved from fourth on the grid to third at the flag, getting ahead of pole man Leclerc.

Horner said the team had responded well to the tricky conditions created by the wet weather at the start.

“I’ve always prided ourselves on us being an attacking race team,” he said. “And we’ve always focused on trying to do the basics well, whether it’s strategy, whether it’s pitstops, thinking on your feet, and I think today was all about thinking on your feet and reacting to the situation as it happens around you.

“And I think that the whole team responded brilliantly well, and the drivers of course had to deliver their part.”

Horner stressed that the key to Perez’s success was judging the crossover from wet to intermediates, and then on to slicks.

“It was an incredible race,” he noted. “We knew there was some rain around, but I don’t think we expected it to be tropical, at the beginning of the race there. It was a little chaotic with the delays, tyres coming on the grid, off the grid, on the grid.

“But with the amount of rain that did fall, it would have been impossible to race in those conditions.

“So once the race finally did get underway, it was always going to be about the crossover, and getting that crossover right. And we went obviously, from the extremes, the inters, to the slicks, and we got those calls right today.

“And the pitwall did a great job, the strategists, particularly the guys in the pit lane, they had to turn around the double stops today and of course, Checo, his performance, on the in-lap, on the out-lap, particularly on the inter…