Red Bull Racing team principal Christian Horner admitted to concerns before the Belgian Grand Prix because of the tire blistering issues suffered by his drivers in qualifying.
With the tire matter the major talking point at Spa, and Pirelli angry that the situation was exacerbated by Red Bull Racing using a camber setup outside of a recommended guidelines, Horner says the issue was taken hugely seriously during preparations for the race.
Although discussions with Pirelli had left his team sure that there would be no safety problems in pushing on with the blistered tires on the high-speed Spa track, he has admitted that he was not completely happy before the start.
"I don't think any of us felt truly comfortable, but we had to believe in the information that we had and the feedback we had from the specialists," Horner said. "We had great support in that respect."
He added: "Adrian [Newey, technical chief] was pretty stressed about the tire, and he takes that responsibility incredibly seriously. None of us wanted to be putting our drivers in any way at any risk."
Despite the focus on the issue revolving around Red Bull Racing's aggressive camber setup, Horner thinks that the unusual weather experienced in Belgium was actually a larger contributing factor.
"I think that it is a unique problem here, and one that if we had had proper dry running on Friday you would have tuned out of the car potentially," explained Horner. "On the prime tire there was no issue at all and the tire was very clean. You could see, particularly on the front-running cars, that all the teams were affected by blistering. Fernando's looked pretty bad at one stage, Lewis was having issues, as was Jenson.
"So I think all the front-running cars seemed to be having issues and it was a consequence of having no dry running in P1, P2 or P3. Then, obviously, the forces put into the tire here are somewhat different to some of the other circuits."
When asked how much consideration the team gave to swapping tires and tweaking its setup, which would have meant starting from the pit lane, Horner said: "A lot. You have to take into consideration safety at the end of the day. We had great support from Pirelli, working with their engineers and with the information they provided to us, we were able to make a decision."