The downfall of Christian Horner: F1 power, politics and plots

July 8, 2025 London

Tuesday morning, two days after the British Grand Prix. Christian Horner is attending a meeting called the previous day by the Red Bull company’s senior Austrian management ostensibly to continue a conversation which had taken place at the preceding Austrian Grand Prix. But a conversation which in reality had been ongoing almost from the moment Dietrich Mateschitz died in October 2022.

This was the conclusion of that long discussion. He was being relieved of his duties with several years still on his contract – for reasons they didn’t care to disclose to him. A financial agreement was reached and the following morning Horner informed his staff by way of an emotional farewell speech. At least they’d granted him that. But otherwise there wasn’t much in the way of ceremony. Not for a boss who had, over a two-decades run, turned a minnow team into a shark, with 124 grand prix victories, six world constructors’ championships and eight drivers’ titles along the way.

July 9, 2025 Milton Keynes

Horner gathered as many as his 2000 staff as was possible around the factory floor to impart the news. There was disbelief, there were tears. But immediately after, he was obliged to leave the premises. Forever. It had been a wild ride.

January 7, 2005 Milton Keynes

Thirty-one-year-old Horner had stood in front of the 450 staff of the former Jaguar F1 team and explained who he was, as their new boss. There was disbelief. The purchaser of the team, Red Bull soft drinks billionaire Dietrich Mateschitz and his adviser Helmut Marko, had introduced him to the floor as the new CEO of the team – and then promptly headed straight back to Austria, leaving him to it, with just a few weeks to go before the first race of the season.

In between those two factory floor speeches was the storied tale which unfolded from that chance. It was about a charismatic, hugely ambitious guy who understood what opportunity looked like, but who knew how to graft to create it, a gifted little operator, empowered by a benevolent billionaire. For what seemed an idyllic 17 years, that was the perfect structure and dynamic, the perfect environment, for one of the greatest F1 teams to bulldoze its place into history. But nothing stays the same. How was paradise lost?

January 1999

Recognising he wasn’t F1 driver material, Horner hung up his helmet to concentrate on running his F3000 team, which he’d founded two years earlier after buying the assets of Helmut Marko’s operation. The Red Bull sponsorship came from that association and the F3000 titles which followed established Horner’s credentials. He was a good businessman, he got good people, he ran a tight ship. Along the way he had become the unofficial F3000 spokesman in any discussions with F1 chief Bernie Ecclestone – and they hit it off. He always made good connections. This wasn’t a coincidence. He was smart.

November 2004

Apparently out of the blue, Marko told Horner that Mateschitz was thinking of giving up his stake in Sauber to buy an F1 team outright. He’d been encouraged in this thought by Ecclestone. Horner had been talking to Ecclestone about the idea of graduating to F1 himself. Mateschitz moved quickly as Ford put its Jaguar-branded F1 team up for sale – and after Marko’s first few meetings with the incumbent bosses there don’t go well, Horner was installed as CEO.

Right there, in how the underestimated Horner worked behind the scenes, how fast and uncomplicated Mateschitz made everything and in how the super-ambitious Horner ran with the opportunities this provided, was the key to the blockbusting success which was to follow. In due time.

The big dogs of F1 at the time – Ron Dennis, Jean Todt, Frank Williams, etc – probably didn’t pay all that much attention to Horner, this green young rookie boss of this apparently bizarre drinks company team, with its loud music and anti-establishment good-time ethos. But that was just a front, a marketing ploy from the Austrians. With the confidence imbued in him by Mateschitz’s hands-off approach to the racing, Horner quietly set about making some big moves. Within less than a year of arriving he lured the world’s greatest designer, Adrian Newey, away from Ron Dennis’s McLaren. Now the big dogs knew who he was.

“Adrian, we’d love to have you. Do you want to come?”

Horner had deployed not just his own informal softly-softly approaches in ensnaring him but also Mateschitz’s toys. After being flown upside down at 500ft above the Austrian countryside in a fighter jet, Newey was definitely getting the idea that this was a more freewheeling atmosphere than the buttoned-downed over-control he was experiencing under Dennis.

In a Motor Sport interview in 2012, Horner recalled: “That evening I broached the subject: ‘Adrian, we’d love to have you. Do you want to come?’ He stated a figure which caught my attention, because it was about 70% higher than I’d warned Dietrich we might have to pay. I called Dietrich, he went quiet for a few seconds, then he said, ‘Let’s go for it.’ That’s the great thing about Red Bull. It’s his company, it belongs just to him and one other person in Thailand. No board meetings, no shareholders’ approvals, just an instant decision.”

So it began, unbelievable success on track, life on warp drive, so fast you could get lost, the millions in success bonuses, celebrity friends, a celebrity wife. Yet the focus in the factory remained in place. A brilliantly capable and simple racing team with the world’s greatest designer creating the cars, Sebastian Vettel and subsequently Max Verstappen setting the tracks alight as they made history. World beaters churned out of Adrian Newey’s mind, through the wind tunnel, onto the circuit, a super-focused bunch of engineering talent in support, the sharpest tools in the box running the cars on track, F1’s talent drawn in by the team’s gravitational pull. It was irresistible. The perfect modern-day F1 blueprint – and Horner had it running like a Swiss watch.

As with all dominant F1 juggernauts, it comes with a sheen of strutting arrogance which is divisive. Whether it was embodied by Vettel’s single finger at the camera celebration, Verstappen’s bullying tactics wheel-to-wheel or Horner’s provocative one-liners, it was there, which brought resentment within the paddock and among the fans. It was only deepened by the idea of the mysterious Austrians in their lair, the power behind it all.

Walking the line between empowerment and entitlement. It’s a tricky one, to have the swagger and confidence needed to make a successful F1 team boss – bold, combative, street smart – without that becoming a belief you are beyond accountability. In or out of the workplace. Even more so in the 2020s than in decades past, with all sorts of societal tripwires ready to rein you in.

Horner was a hybrid between the traditional team boss who founds and runs his own team in his own image and answers to no one – Frank Williams, Ron Dennis, Eddie Jordan – and the current Premier League manager-style employee boss. That’s where the fault line lay. He had founded his own team and though he subsequently became a Red Bull employee, it was only notionally so when Dietrich Mateschitz ran the parent company. Plus, Horner was CEO of the race team, not merely a principal.

Because Mateschitz provided the budget and stood back, Horner was allowed to operate the team just like those traditional guys, just like it was his own team, with the focus only on performance, not with any career path or political interference to worry about. He ran it like the CEO of any company. As the boss.

Once Horner had been given those keys, he made himself part of the very fabric of the organisation. Not only did he bring in Newey and negotiate the deals with heavy-duty engine partners Renault and Honda, he also brought in billions of sponsorship money over the years. Oracle, Infiniti, Exxon Mobil, TAG: they were all his deals. He was not simply spending the money provided by the Austrian benefactor parent company, he was bringing it in too.

As F1 expanded commercially, so too did the teams within it. When F1, under Liberty, became effectively a franchise system as the sport’s popularity ballooned in the Netflix era, so the value of those teams skyrocketed. Especially Red Bull, by then the dominant team once more after bringing the long Mercedes era to an end. So too did the profile of the leading players, Horner especially, as he played the part of the leading baddie at war with the other baddies. Pantomime – and he was perfect in the role. But still the team purred along, a well-oiled machine.

October 22, 2022 Dietrich’s death

“Horner objected strongly to the Porsche deal. It would have meant loss of control of the team”

A few months before the founder was claimed by cancer, he’d initially approved of a proposal for Porsche to take a 50/50 stake in the team. That deal had been presented to him by Oliver Mintzlaff, Red Bull’s corporate projects chief (and before that CEO of Red Bull’s football team, RB Leipzig).

Horner objected strongly to it. It was easy to see why. It would have meant loss of control of the team he’d built up. No way would either Porsche or Horner tolerate being an equal partner, regardless of what the agreement might say. But beyond even that, the terms of the proposed deal did not seem to reflect the Netflix-era valuation of the team, at sub-$1bn.

Horner was proactive. Recall how in 2012 he’d mentioned that the team ‘belongs just to [Mateschitz] and one other person in Thailand’? Chalerm Yoovidhya, son of the man who had invented the drink, was a 51% shareholder in the business. Operationally it was run by Mateschitz, but he was in fact only a 49% shareholder. Horner persuaded Yoovidhya that the Porsche deal was bad – and he in turn brought Mateschitz to the same conclusion. The Porsche deal was off.

That was Horner’s first encounter with Mintzlaff and the acrimony between them is easy to imagine. From Mintzlaff’s perspective he’d been undermined. Whereas from Horner’s, he’d almost lost the team he’d spent years building just through the bright idea of some corporate guy in Austria who was not from the racing world.

Mintzlaff was still running the soccer team in 2021 when Horner had got Mateschitz’s approval for the £200m investment necessary to create Red Bull Powertrains on the team’s Milton Keynes site. Evolving from just an F1 team to an entity which produces its own power units was an enormous commitment. “Honda pulling out stimulated it,” said Horner as the factory was unveiled in ’23. “Initially after they made that announcement the plan was to have built shops and use Honda IP until we found another partner. But we realised that going back to being a customer wasn’t very attractive.

“We could see there was huge potential to attract talent and we asked what would it take for us to do it ourselves and I managed to get the [power unit] rule change delayed by a year to 2026. And that was the catalyst. The shareholders signed off the plan and we decided to go for it.”

Easing the financial burden at this time, Horner brought in Ford, which committed to half of the investment. But as well as finally putting the team in full control of its own destiny, no longer hostage to automotive boardroom decisions, the expansion also increased Horner’s power base. There was now a whole other entity under his control.

All these developments were factors in what happened in the wake of Mateschitz’s death after the founder was replaced by three people within the Austrian organisation, one of which was Mintzlaff. The Formula 1 project would now come under his purview as the CEO of corporate projects. The former soccer chief was now effectively Horner’s boss and maybe he looked upon Horner as the equivalent of a soccer manager rather than a CEO. Here’s where that fault line – never really visible during Mateschitz’s time – became a yawning chasm.

It soon became clear that the new management did not share Mateschitz’s hands-off approach to the F1 programme. It was nervous of such a major part of the business being not directly in their control. Suddenly Horner was having to fight his corner about decisions, no longer with the autonomy he’d become used to and which had worked so well.

Look at any of the dominant F1 teams of the last two decades or more and the blueprint is clear: minimal corporate overrule once the right leaders are in place. It was at the heart of why the Schumacher–Brawn-Todt axis worked at Ferrari, it’s how Renault won two world titles, how Mercedes came to dominate, how the current McLaren team is so devastatingly effective – and it’s how Red Bull ruled the tracks for so long. That’s just how it works.

In the leaking of Horner’s texting controversy with a female employee there was clearly someone within trying to bring about his resignation. Jos Verstappen was clearly aligned with those aims, publicly stating he believed Horner should go and that the team would be ‘torn apart’ if he didn’t. It’s said that there was even a press release prepared announcing Horner’s departure. But Horner refused to go. Instead, he enlisted the help of Yoovidhya and brought in his own legal counsel. He was staying by force rather than consent.

The team continued to dominate initially – winning all but one race in 2023. But the transition from perfect integration of corporate and racing to the two sides being opposed made for an unpleasant atmosphere. As did the whole protracted case around the employee’s dismissal and the reasons for it. People began to leave – including, disastrously, Newey.

“Some suggest Horner may even have lost Yoovidhya’s support”

When the domination ceased and McLaren became F1’s new force, so the pressure on Horner only increased. There was now more leverage for that. Constantly having to fight and answer for himself, the meetings between him, Mintzlaff and Yoovidhya became increasingly aggressive. Some suggest he may even have lost Yoovidhya’s support. Bloomberg reported that Yoovidhya had sold his pivoting 2% in May. Was that a tax efficient convenience? Or did it pave the way for the Austrian management to do what it had long wished?

The meeting at the Austrian Grand Prix was to discuss with Horner the management’s proposal to relieve him of responsibility for marketing (under which role Horner had brought in the sponsorship). He disagreed. A few days later he was summoned to London.

Corporate Red Bull has now achieved what it wished in agreeing a departure settlement with Horner. That’s the easy part. Achieving long-term F1 success will be infinitely more difficult.

Quotes on a scandal

“Red Bull has released Christian Horner from his operational duties with effect from today”
Red Bull GMBH statement on July 9

“It’s been an honour to be part of this incredible era of motor sport”
A ‘shocked’ Horner reacts

“The decision came as a shock… I wanted to stand in front of all of you to break this news, and express my gratitude to every single member of the team that has given so much during the 20 and a half years”
Horner’s emotional factory farewell speech on July 10

“There has been a lot of drama there over the last couple of years – maybe it’s been getting worse. I’m not surprised”
Zak Brown reacts to the news

“From my first race win, to four world championships, we have shared incredible successes. Thank you for everything, Christian!”
Max Verstappen takes to Instagram