Overnight, the CEO of Red Bull Racing was no longer answering to a benevolent patron but to a corporate projects boss “who maybe looked upon Horner as the equivalent of a soccer manager rather than a CEO”.
To make matters worse for the team boss, seeds of tension had already been sown before Mateschitz’s death.
Mintzlaff, then still running RB Leipzig, had championed a Porsche buy-in that would have given the carmaker a 50% stake in Red Bull Racing.
Horner was horrified: “It would have meant loss of control of the team he’d built up” – and moved fast. He persuaded Chalerm Yoovidhya, Red Bull’s 51% shareholder in Thailand, to oppose it. Mateschitz followed suit, killing the deal.
From Mintzlaff’s perspective, he’d been undermined. From Horner’s, he’d just saved his team from a bad bargain. Either way, the damage was done.
Oliver Mintzlaff with Christian Horner
Red Bull
After Mateschitz’s death, Horner’s freedom shrank. Big decisions were no longer instant calls between two men; they were corporate debates. The hands-off trust was replaced with scrutiny.
“Suddenly Horner was having to fight his corner… no longer with the autonomy he’d become used to and which had worked so well,” Hughes writes.
The irony was that Horner’s success had made him harder to control. He wasn’t just a team boss; he was a rainmaker who had lured Adrian Newey, brought in billion-dollar sponsorships, and even created Red Bull Powertrains, a new engine division funded in part by Ford. The empire was vast, and it was his.
But that empire was also what made him a threat to the new order.
On July 8, 2025, two days after the British Grand Prix, Horner walked into a meeting with Red Bull’s senior Austrian management. It was the conclusion of a conversation that had “been ongoing almost from the moment Dietrich Mateschitz died”.
The result: he was relieved of his duties, with years still left on his contract.
Read Mark Hughes’ full analysis on Christian Horner’s Red Bull exit