'Red Bull lost its mojo after I left': Christian Horner on his former F1 team and Ferrari 'dream'

Christian Horner has said Red Bull has “lost its mojo, its presence, its vibe” since his departure, and, when asked about his future, called Ferrari “the biggest brand in Formula 1… the dream. It’s the sleeping giant of Formula 1.”

Speaking to The Times from the Oxfordshire home Horner shares with his wife Geri, the comments on their own aren’t particularly controversial for an outspoken man like Horner, known for creating headlines on a weekly basis while he was still at the helm of Red Bull until he was fired last year. But they do offer an insight into how Horner sees his talents within F1.

His former Red Bull team, now under the leadership of Laurent Mekies, sits a distant fourth in the constructors’ championship, a long way from the dominance of the Max Verstappen years, and hasn’t won a race all year.

Meanwhile, Ferrari’s underachievement relative to its resources is close to a permanent feature of modern Formula 1 punditry.

One team, he says, lost something after he was left. The other is waiting for someone to arrive and switch the lights on. He leaves that someone unnamed, but it’s audibly him.

“Would I consider Ferrari? I mean, Ferrari is the biggest brand in Formula 1. It’s the dream. I would just blend into the uniform,” he says.

That Horner suggests he could be Ferrari’s saviour is a tidy piece of self-mythology, and it isn’t an accident.

In the interview, the same move happens again and again.

Former Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko is ‘abrasive, erratic, cold, unreliable, ruthless and disloyal.’

Adrian Newey, by Horner’s account, showed his true colours the moment Ferrari came calling in 2014: “At the first sign of adversity, Adrian wanted to abandon ship.”

Mercedes Toto Wolff is vain, corporate and “disrespectful.”

Ex-Red Bull driver Daniel Ricciardo, in a smaller and stranger dig, is outed as a driver who used to expense bottles of water.

Even former Toro Rosso/AlphaTauri boss Franz Tost gets filed as “old school, married to the track, and sometimes awkward to deal with”.

Across an interview that runs to several thousand words, Horner finds fault with practically everyone who has shared a garage with him.

He appears to find almost none in himself, beyond conceding he might be “a bit of a Marmite character.”

Horner says his Red Bull payoff, reported to be over £50m, “demonstrates that you’ve done nothing wrong. They just don’t want you any more. If somebody’s prepared to pay that much money for you not to be there…”

It’s true that Red Bull’s competitiveness has dropped over the past year, and it’s also true that Ferrari has failed to use all its resources to emerge as the leading force even under the great opportunity presented by the rules reset.

None of that proves Horner would have kept Red Bull winning or could help Ferrari return to its glory days.

But the interview highlights that Horner is, as ever, an extremely good narrator of his own indispensability, and he seems to know it.

Asked whether he’ll be back on the grid next year, he offers the closest thing to self-awareness in the entire conversation: “I don’t know. I’m the cure and the problem.”