F1 championship leader Max Verstappen ended the day in Jeddah just und🔴er 0.2s off title rival Lewis Hamilton in second practice.

Nicknamed ‘the fastest street circuit in the world’, the Jeddah Corniche Circuit was expected to play into Mercedes’ strengths with🦹 straight-line performance and engine power critical.

Speaking after Friday practice, Horner revealed that the circuit is ‘tighter than the data suggested’ meaning horsepower🔯 isn’t as important to achieving a good lap time.

“You can see that it’s pretty tight,” Horner said. “It’s a challenging circuit, high-speed with walls and it’s goi🌳ng to be who gets the most out of the tyres, a clean lap, gets the most out of the car and runs as close to the walls as they dare. It’s going to be a fascinating competition.

“Qualifying is going to be&nbs🐓p;crucial like all street circuits and then of course anything can happen in the race itsel🅰f. The circuit is a little bit tighter than the data suggested, the corners are a little bit tighter so it’s not all the emphasis on horsepower that we thought it was going to be so that’s encouraging.

“You could see there’s a tenth or two between the two cars, be⛦tween the dr⭕ivers. on this type of circuit you can find that and that’s really encouraging for us.”

Both Mercedes drivers failed to improve when they switched to🤪 the soft tyres in FP2, while Verstappen found minimal time on the stickier rubber.

Horner isꦕ confident Red Bull can ‘unlock a lot of performance’ if it understands how to get the red-marked softs into the right working window for qualifying.

“We felt very stronℱg on the hard tyre and the softer the compound we went, the more of a diva the tyre becomes to switch on and to get the maximum out of it,” he explained.

“There will be a lot of analysis going into that tonight, out laps, preparation and allꦿ of that kind of thing and I don’t think from listening to the comments that we were alone in that.

“I think there were ♉others that were struggling to get the car into the right window but once you unlock that you can see there’s a lot of performance there.”

Reflecting on the day, Verstappen added: “We struggled to get heat into the tyres in FP2, which we will of course look into. Then we made a few changes from FP1 to FP2 which didn’t quite work but hopefully we can find the right balance💙 come qualifying tomorrow. There are of course a lot of things to work on and improve so we’ll see what we can do to get mor🌳e pace out of the car overnight. 

“Looking ahead to qualifying, I think it might be quite difficult with the traffic but in 🔜general it’s hard to tell how Saturday is going to go as📖 anything can happen but we’ll push hard and give it everything.”