New Queensland rugby coach Ewen McKenzie has higher expectations of the Reds than all the doubters who have written his team off after several seasons of struggling in the Super tournament.

The Reds have finished in the lower reaches of the ladder for several seasons, but McKenzie isn't prepared to set the bar of expectation as low as many of the pundits have done.

"You've got to have ambition and I think that's there with our group," McKenzie told AAP at the Super 14 season launch in Sydney on Tuesday.

"You've got to have ambitions about being in the finals, you've got to think about that.

"The expectation is that people are going to be happy if we win four games, it's more than what they've done the last few years.

"That's not enough for someone like myself, you want to be a consistent winning team.

"We've got some goals in and around that, but I'm not going to put any ceilings on how many games we win, but we've got high expectations."

Reds skipper and Wallabies lock James Horwill said McKenzie had placed a big emphasis on attitude since his arrival at the Reds.

"We've higher expectations of ourselves, the public expectation on us is a lot lower than maybe some of the other teams that are expected to do well," Horwill told AAP.

"We are not going to put a limit on where we want to finish."

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