Christian Horner wants an F1 comeback

Times

16 hours ago

Christian Horner arrived at Red Bull in early 2005. The energy drinks company had recently bought Jaguar Racing and the old bosses left the premises only half an hour before the 31-year-old turned up to run the operation. 'I was the new team principal and was probably the youngest man in the room,' Horner told the then Times correspondent, Kevin Eason. 'I arrived at my desk in my new office with some unopened Christmas cards, a half-drunk cup of coffee on the desk and a secretary weeping outside. I thought, 'OK, where do I start?''
Two decades on, and Red Bull are in a similar state of flux, but what of the man himself? A Marmite figure who was known to have difficult relationships with some of the Austrian ownership of Red Bull, it was still a seismic shock in Formula 1 and beyond when on Wednesday his departure, effectively a sacking, was announced to the world.
Understood to be earning about £12million a year and contracted until 2030, it remains to be seen how that issue is settled, although it likely ends with the 51-year-old having a boosted bank balance.
Laurent Mekies, the new team principal and CEO, has big boots to fill. Horner's superpower, as such, was not to know every intricate detail of the design of Red Bull's car. In fact, Mekies, who has an engineering background, will almost certainly have more expertise in that regard.
But that is not what brought many Red Bull staff to tears on Wednesday morning, in his emotional leaving speech. It was his ability to lead, not to those who regularly sat around long tables in important meetings, but to the factory floor. The hundreds of people of whom many will never be named in these pages, but without them there would not be a race car.
Those who know Horner away from the microphones describe a character who despite having plenty of celebrity friends, and a Spice Girl wife, has the interpersonal skills to make you (and the you could be as relatively unimportant as the staff member who shines the trophies) feel like you matter. At any one time, you can be on his level, even if you cannot ride the private jets and don't have 2½million Instagram followers.
Horner was unapologetically hungry for power. Ultimately that was part of his downfall, although in the end there was a sense of inevitability to his exit.
For 20 years he had navigated the Piranha Club — former McLaren team boss Ron Dennis's description which is now commonplace, for the ruthless world of Formula 1. There are people who enter that sphere and quit within months. The relentless travel, the competition and the downright dirty tactics that mean almost as much time is spent on bringing down your rivals as it is on your own excellence, can be exhausting. It is also intoxicating.
The latter was firmly the case for Horner, and he did not hide in the shadows. He made clear where he stood, who was with him and who was against him. At the start of his two decades in charge, there were plenty of characters like that; Dennis, Bernie Ecclestone and Flavio Briatore, to name a few.
In recent years they lessened, engineers took more prominence, big corporations taking greater control over the public image of teams (as Red Bull are now expected to with Mekies in charge).
Horner was often villainised, and at times the way he, and his team, went racing was deeply unpopular with his rivals. McLaren and Mercedes, in particular, prided themselves on the fact they raced with integrity and rose above much of the sniping.
Toto Wolff described Horner as a 'yapping little terrier' last year, in one chapter of their epic rivalry. Both lead in entirely different ways, at teams with divergent outlooks (Mercedes are more corporate, whereas Red Bull have always been a disruptor brand) but the irony is that Horner departs the paddock with only Wolff left of that 'old guard'. The bad guy, to his good guy, is no more.
The modern role of team boss has evolved over the years. Once the likes of Horner and Wolff's all-encompassing role was the norm. Now the McLaren model, where Zak Brown is chief executive officer, and Andrea Stella is team principal, is fashionable, similarly to the trend in football of head coaches rather than managers.
For McLaren it works excellently. Stella, who has an engineering background, can focus on that side of the team and has been credited with reorganising staff to work to the best of their potential. Brown is a brilliant marketer, his well-told story from Wheel of Fortune to Formula 1 is credit to his resilience and self-belief, and takes much of the public pressure away from Stella. In sizeable decisions, for example the use of team orders in a title race, both work in tandem.
If Horner is to return to the paddock it will not be in a hierarchy like that. He desires control over all aspects of the business — from commercial, where he brought in multi-million-pound deals for Red Bull, to driver decisions and race-day operations like sitting on the pitwall and speaking to media.
Again, like Wolff, few if any, have managed to straddle the Ecclestone era (who is a close friend of Horner) and the Netflix generation. Part of the credit in that regard should go to Paul Smith, Red Bull's former group director of communications, who was axed alongside his boss.
There are some team principals who feel that role is too big, and perhaps only figures with as much experience as Horner and Wolff can juggle it. Horner has already been linked with Ferrari, who have approached him about their team principal role in the past, but are in negotiations with Fréd Vasseur to extend his contract.
The most obvious hurdle to that, apart from the probability of needing to uproot his family abroad, is that there is a very defined 'Ferrari way'. Horner doesn't speak Italian, and while Vasseur runs the race team, CEO Benedetto Vigna has significant control.
For now, as he stressed in his leaving speech, the focus is on his family as he warned he is 'shit at DIY'. Many who work in the paddock have remarked that they were neither a great supporter of Red Bull, nor Horner personally, but that his departure is a major blow for a sport keen to market its big characters. At the Belgium Grand Prix in a fortnight, there will be no Horner. Where he next emerges, however, is only a matter of time.