Horner surprised: 'Very unusual that Mercedes are in this situation'

"Reliability can be decisive. You have got to be there at the end of the race. Mercedes are weighing up that the risk versus reward," Horner said on Autosport.com.

He stressed that it is surprising for Mercedes to struggle with reliability.

"They've obviously been the benchmark of reliability the last six or seven years. So it's unusual that they are in this situation."

Toto Wolff himself has already admitted that Mercedes doesn't quite understand the reliability issues yet.

Can Red Bull see it through to the end?

"We're hoping to get it through to the end of the year with what we have, but that's our assumption. I think the situations can change quite quickly, as you can see, so you know, you can never say never. But we feel that by taking a penalty in Sochi, it got us back into a reasonable position,"  Horner continued.

"I think we are pushing them hard this year. We've really thrown everything at this season and at pretty much every race we've managed to give them a hard time. So when you consider how dominant they've been the last seven years and that this car is largely a carry-over of last year's car, which was arguably their most dominant car, it's testimony to the [Red Bull] team. go."