Christian Horner says Sebastian Vettel would have finished behind both McLarens in China if they'd gone for a three-stopper.
Sunday's race in Shanghai saw Vettel's run of race victories came to an abrupt end when he was beaten to the chequered flag by Lewis Hamilton.
However, there must be some who are wondering if Red Bull scored an own goal when they opted to put Vettel on a two-stop strategy as this meant Hamilton had the fresher tyres in the final few laps and the German stood no chance against him.
Horner, though, insists it was the right call as Vettel had lost out to both McLarens at the start.
"We thought we could make it work, but we came up four laps shy of making that strategy work," Horner told the BBC.
"We made the decision based on being P3 behind the McLarens; we thought that was the best way to beat them. If we had made three stops behind them we'd have probably been behind both of them, so we thought we'd try something different.
"P2 is still a great result.
"At the end, Lewis was so much quicker it wasn't worth fighting so hard. He made him work for it, but it was inevitable in the end."
As for Mark Webber, he put in a phenomenal drive to go from P18 to P3 thanks to his three-stop strategy.
"Effectively for Mark we ran the race in reverse, he had a slow first stint on the primes and then he just got faster and faster. I told him to enjoy it and it looked like he did, he drove a great race."
With a break between China and the next race in Turkey, Horner says Red Bull are determined to resolve their KERS issues after both drivers again had problems on Sunday afternoon.
"KERS worked well for the first half of the race and then became more intermittent in the latter part. We have got three weeks between now and Istanbul to make it work."
