In football it’s become a cliché, but no less true for being repeated, that you’re only as good as your last game. Even managers with the most gilded of track records can be ignominiously fired if their team’s form slips into a prolonged dip.
Christian Horner’s sacking after over 20 years at the helm of Red Bull Racing, during which the team won six constructors’ championships and eight drivers’ titles, is further evidence of what you might term the footballification of F1.
Horner’s contract is understood to have run to 2030 but a cocktail of personal scandal, internal warfare – leading to the departure of at least one high-profile member of staff – and inconsistent on-track performance has taken the fizz off that championship record. It will have been expensive to buy him out of his contract five years early but the decision to do so indicates Horner lost crucial supporters at boardroom level.
For much of the first four decades of the world championship, the majority of teams were owned and managed by the people whose names were above the factory door: Enzo Ferrari, Frank Williams, Ken Tyrrell, Charles Cooper, Jack Brabham, Bruce McLaren, Rob Walker, Guy Ligier, Jackie Stewart, Eddie Jordan. Colin Chapman’s initials were enshrined in the Lotus logo.
The balance began to shift as manufacturers became involved and F1’s commercial reach expanded. Through launches or acquisitions, teams have gradually become outposts of large corporations rather than fundamentally small businesses. Perhaps rightly so – in the 1970s you could fit the trackside operational personnel of a typical team into one large car, now there are hundreds of people on the payroll.
With corporate ownership and big-company reporting structures has come a generation of professional managers who are just another link in the chain of command. Toto Wolff is an outlier here as a team principal with skin in the game, being a shareholder of Mercedes GP.
This is not, of course, to say that team bosses off yore didn’t bear the consequences of failure personally. Ligier bumped along the bottom for several years before selling up, as did Williams and Tyrrell (whose team eventually became, from a paperwork standpoint at least, Mercedes). After Enzo Ferrari’s death his beloved team became the province of Fiat suits.
McLaren’s recent history proved to be a harbinger of what was to come for Horner: Ron Dennis, who turned the team around in the early 1980s, was driven out by his fellow shareholders in 2017 after several seasons of embarrassing underperformance.
There are a few parallels between McLaren and Red Bull in this regard. Dennis originally took control of McLaren via a shotgun marriage between his organisation and what was then a publicly struggling F1 team, engineered by key sponsor Marlboro. Once he was in full command he imprinted his punctilious stamp upon the whole organisation, made the right technical hires, broke new commercial ground, and McLaren dominated grand prix racing for much of the decade.
But he also fell out with one of those key technical hires, John Barnard.
Like Dennis, Horner had built a successful racing team of his own through the lower categories before he was tapped up by a sponsor to make the move into F1. At the end of 2004 Red Bull acquired the moribund Jaguar Racing, which had spent the previous five seasons providing a case study in corporate bungling. Armed with a virtually bottomless budget to transform the team, Horner recruited Adrian Newey and the rest is history.
And history often rhymes with itself: in this case, Horner’s ultimate falling-out with Newey.
It’s understood that through the turbulence of the past 18 months, Horner has been able to count on the support of the Yoovidhya dynasty, which owns 51% of the parent company. The other 49% is owned by Mark Mateschitz, whose father Dietrich went to Thailand a toothpaste salesman and returned a beverage entrepreneur, having cut a deal to distribute the energy drink invented by Chalerm Yoovidhya.
When Dietrich Mateschitz died in 2022 he left his affairs in order, splitting his position into separate roles in which his son assumed his shareholding but professional manager Oliver Mintzlaff effectively ran the company. But any regime change, even one as neatly planned as this, can bring factional warfare in its wake – especially for those with close ties to the previous one.
In this case, despite Horner’s close relationship with Mateschitz Sr, it was known that he resented the constant presence of ‘driver advisor’ Dr Helmut Marko as a minister without portfolio, Mateschitz’s eyes and ears on the factory floor. In the wake of the founder’s death, an unseemly power struggle kicked off.
The political fault lines were exposed after Horner was accused of coercive behaviour and sexual harassment by a female employee early last year. Various details and apparent evidence which might otherwise have remained confidential entered the public domain via leaks to the media.
A picture of the internecine sniping emerged in which Horner wanted Marko out, but Max Verstappen and his father Jos remained loyal to Marko – making it clear that if he went, they would follow presently. It’s understood that Mateschitz Jr supported Verstappen and Marko while Horner had the backing of the Yoovidhya family – which he has now lost.
Over the past 18 months since the scandal broke, Red Bull has lost its position of on-track dominance and all measure taken to restore previous norms have failed. Among the key issues has been its inability to develop a car from which both drivers can regularly extract peak performance.
Horner has repeatedly downplayed the alignment of the timeline between this and the departure of Adrian Newey. He also waved off Newey’s significance to the project as a whole – an outlook which is known to have been a contributor to Newey, one of the most successful engineers in grand prix history, wanting to leave in the first place.
Perception is all in politics, as well as F1, and it becomes very difficult to spin to your allies that all is well when senior personnel leave (as well as Newey, sporting director Jonathan Wheatley has gone and head of strategy Will Courtenay is due to join McLaren), the car is inconsistent, operational blunders set in (as in Bahrain this year), and your star driver becomes noisily disgruntled about all of the above.
In terms of blaming the second driver for all the problems, replacing Sergio Perez with Liam Lawson, then dropping Lawson for Yuki Tsunoda after two races, has merely demonstrated the wisdom of that old saying about repeating a failed course of action and expecting a different result.
Against this background, Horner’s position became untenable. The question now is whether Laurent Mekies can restore order.
A wise course of action would be to avoid making the same mistakes. Insiders say that Horner was overstretched as a consequence of taking leadership of the new engine project as well as running the team and trying to extend his influence over the technical department.
It worked better when he let Wheatley drill the team into the best in the business and delegated the transformation of the technical set-up to Newey. When a team wins under your overall leadership it’s easy – no matter how many hours you put in at the office – to become complacent and to assume the success is all your own work.
But as Newey himself has often said of his own back catalogue of cars - some of which were by his own admission not great - if you seek to claim all the glory for the successes, you have to bear the responsibility for the failures. Those eight drivers’ championships and six constructors’ titles were the result of a team effort, and that team has now broken up.
So Mekies gets to write his own chapter of Red Bull’s history. And Horner will no doubt not be unemployed for long. In the corporate world, just like football, leaders come and go: they may not like to think so, but they are just parts of a machine, easily interchanged.
