Horner criticises his fellow F1 team principals – Christian Horner is celebrating his 21st season as the team principal of Red Bull Racing. He joined Formula One in 2005 taking over the remnants of the Jaguar F1 racing team whose Ford owned project lay in tatters.
Red Bull Racing’s owner Didi Mateschitz of course owned the energy drinks company which paid for a token £1 for the team on the promise he would invest $400m over the next three years. A disillusioned Adrian Newey was recruited from McLaren at the end of 2005 and his first complete car design for the team came in 2007 with the RB3.
The team had its best finish in 2007 since becoming Red Bull Racing, climbing to fifth in the constructors’ championship with drivers David Coulthard and Mark Webber. Following a surprise win for Sebastian Vettel in the junior squad the following season, the German was promoted alongside Mark Webber for 2009.
Red Bull’s early successes
Red Bull that year chased down a valiant effort from the cash poor Brawn GP team and although they had the fastest car some the final quarter of the season, the fairy tale for Jenson Button and his team boss Ross Brawn was completed as Red Bull came home second in the team championship.
From 2010-2013, Vettel, Red Bull and Renault dominated the sport before Mercedes and their new V6 turbo wiped the floor with the field for the next seven seasons. Red Bull returned to the top in 2021 with Max Verstappen, and ever since the pair have been the force to beat in F1.
Yet over the year’s since Horner and Red Bull’s arrival, F1 has changed beyond recognition. Elements of this Christian Horner now believes have not been for the better despite the recent boom in the series since being acquired by US publicly quoted company Liberty Media.
The sale of F1’a commercial rights by CVC to Liberty Media in 2017 marked the current rise in the sport’s fortunes as the popular Netflix series began to take off across the pond. Now with an all time high in terms of viewership, F1 each year is the most watched annual sporting series in the world.
F1’s historic crisis moments
Yet bigger is now always better as Christian Horner now suggests as he recalls the big shifts in the dynamics amongst his peers. The Red Bull team principal bemoans the loss of respect between the F1 team managers, although back in the day there were regular heated rows amongst them principals as they fought to establish their own superiority.
Pride and stubbornness led a number of times to farcical situations, such as the US Grand Prix at the Indianapolis Speedway in Horner’s second year in the sport. There a disagreement about a late course chicane being added, which meant the teams using Michelin tyres did not take part in the event.
The Michelins on the banking at the IMS were under extreme G-Forces and had proven to be unstable and potentially dangerous when being driven flat out. A proposal to insert a chicane to mitigate this was rejected by the Bridgestone runners which included Ferrari, Jordan and Minardi (the year before they became Toro Rosso).
The following season saw McLaren at the centre of a spy gate scandal, which saw the team fined a record $100m by the FIA. This was later reduced to $50m on appeal but such was the enmity between the parties, Bernie Ecclestone was reported as saying the fine was $5m for cheating and $95m for team owner and boss Ron Dennis being a “c%$t”.
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Loss of F1 ‘entrepreneurial’ managers
But Horner believes even in these times when the “Piranha Club” was at its most intense, those in charge of the F1 teams had forever their eye on the future of the sport. “When I came into the sport, sitting around the table was Bernie Ecclestone running it with Max Mosley [FIA President],” Planet F1 report the Red Bull boss as saying.
“You had Ron Dennis running McLaren, Frank Williams at Williams, Jean Todt at Ferrari, and Flavio Briatore running Renault. Eddie Jordan was still around when I first started, and they were big personalities and big characters. Yes, there were always disagreements, but there was a commonality of agreeing on what was right for the business, and what was right for the sport, because they were all relatively entrepreneurial.”
Horner believes today all this has changed with those who now manage the teams having no long term skin in the game. “Nowadays, you look around the room and, save for a few, it’s largely a bunch of managers, as opposed to perhaps that entrepreneurial spirit that existed previously,” he adds. “There were always rivalries; I mean, Jean and Ron never particularly saw eye-to-eye, but there was always respect that, sometimes, I think is a little lacking these days.”
Horner, Brown and Wolff fight it out
In recent times Horner and Mercedes’ boss Toto Wolff have often exchanged words with the Red Bull Boss famously telling his rival in Canada 2022: “You’ve got a problem, change your f**king car.” Mercedes at the time were struggling with the new ground effect regulations and Wolff was trying to garner agreement for the F1 car designs to be changed – under the banner of “safety” for his drivers.
The same year as it became Red Bull were not in complete compliance with the new FIA cost cap rules, Zak Brown of McLaren wrote an open letter to the FIA in which it stated. “The overspend breach, and possibly the procedural breaches, constitute cheating by offering a significant advantage across technical, sporting, and financial regulations.”
The accusation of cheating was later deemed over the top as the excess spend was a paltry amount, probably worth just the cost of designing and building two new front wings. These big three team bosses regularly slug it out as in days of old, yet the rest including Renault’s consultant Briatore, are project managers for remote corporate owners.
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With over 30 years of experience in Formula 1 as an insider journalist, I have built trusted connections across the paddock, from race engineers and mechanics to senior team figures. At The Judge 13, I and a handful of trusted colleagues share exclusive Formula 1 news, expert analysis and behind-the-scenes stories you will not find in mainstream motorsport media.
