Red Bull boss, Christian Horner, dismisses talk of a crisis within his team.

It has been widely reported that senior engineers held a meeting in the aftermath of the Bahrain race and Max Verstappen's manager was involved in a heated exchange with Helmut Marko, leading to claims that the team is in crisis.

Not so, insists Horner.

"If you sit down with your engineers and discuss the race, I wouldn't describe that as a crisis summit," he said in Jeddah, "we have lots of such discussions.

"I think the crisis summit was described as the meeting after the race in Bahrain," he continued, "but you sit down and you discuss these things logically. There's always engineering solutions to engineering issues.

"There's not a crisis," he insisted. "We're not where we want to be, we've got some issues with the car that we're working through and the whole team's working incredibly hard.

"I think we understand what the issues are, and we're introducing a series of upgrades over the coming races to try and address some of those shortcomings."

Not for the first time, Horner pointed to convergence as the reason for the fact that his team is slipping down the order.

"When you get stable regulations like this, the benefit of them is that you get convergence; all the teams are doing a very good job now," he said. "You look how much faster we're going the previous years, all the teams, especially the front teams, have converged. There's no bad teams in Formula 1.

"We've got some vices in our car that with the margins being so close... if you listen to Max's comments, if he's not confident on the car on turning in, he's having that instability issue that's worth tenths, hundreds of a second, which in such a tight grid is multiple places.

"We know when we can tidy that up, performance will come."

However, the team's problems started long before, in fact they go back to October 2022 and the death of founder Dietrich Mateschitz.

While control of his empire appeared to pass peacefully, it is known that, particularly within the F1 team, there was a subsequent power struggle, with the 'Austrian faction' looking to take control.

Whether this faction was behind the Horner saga that dominated the headlines for much of last year we don't know, but amidst the struggle Horner was found to have friends in high places, not least most of the team's HQ in Milton Keynes.

The power struggle has already seen a numerous high profile departures, not least Adrian Newey, and despite Horner's denial of a crisis there is clearly an ongoing issue within the team that appears to be causing it to head into freefall.

Sadly, things are likely to get worse before they get better. Of course, that's if they get better.

There was always the fear that Mateschitz would grow tired of the sport and withdraw his support of one or even both his teams. At a time the Saudis are said to be eyeing entering the sport as team owners, and the likes of Zak Brown and Stefano Domenicali are presenting the sport as the goose that consistently lays golden eggs, what are the chances of Red Bull's owners saying "enough"?

Check out our Friday gallery from Jeddah here.