Formula One has sometimes failed to fire the imagination in recent years but the duel between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen has gripped fans across the world and evoked the sport’s most compelling rivalries.
While the drivers have fought on the track across 21 races before Sunday’s showdown in Abu Dhabi, the Mercedes team principal, Toto Wolff, and his Red Bull counterpart, Christian Horner, have acted as figureheads for their respective teams. When they speak it is for not only the drivers but the pit crews, engineers and mechanics, designers and hundreds of factory staff.
Horner is the longest-serving principal in F1, in charge at Red Bull since 2005. Wolff has been with Mercedes since 2013. Both are well established and accomplished figures but some of their exchanges this season have been a little undignified.
Horner called his rival a “control freak”, leading the Austrian to venture that the Englishman was a “windbag who always wants to be on camera”. “The more Toto gets wound up, the more fun it becomes,” Horner fired back, an idea Wolff assessed as “worrying”. “Sometimes I was carried away when I heard comments that annoyed me,” Wolff admitted last week.
These outbursts have set the tone for an increasingly acrimonious contest. Verstappen said on Thursday his view of Hamilton had changed, and “not in a positive way”. It is clear Wolff and Horner now share that feeling about each other.
“I have no issue with Toto,” Horner told Donald McRae in October – nothing personal, it appeared. By the time the teams arrived in the Middle East for this weekend’s high-stakes decider in Abu Dhabi, that neutrality had evaporated. “We’re both competitive,” Horner said on Friday. “I have respect for Mercedes, I have respect for Toto but it doesn’t mean I have to like him.”
Both men have instinctively backed their drivers on racing incidents that remain open to interpretation. As the season has unfolded there have been flashes of anger and claims of injustice from either side. If there was a single moment when the mood darkened it was the accident at Silverstone in July when Verstappen slammed into the barriers at Copse. The Dutchman was taken to hospital while Hamilton streaked away to victory.
Horner insisted Hamilton’s 10-second penalty for that incident, when he clipped Verstappen’s rear left tyre heading into that flat-out corner, was insufficient. His sense of outrage was manifold: accusing Hamilton of “dirty driving”, he complained of Verstappen’s life being placed in danger, along with the team losing a badly damaged engine and car. “I don’t think I have to apologise for anything,” Hamilton countered, while Wolff, before the next race in Hungary, said Horner had been “below the belt” in his criticism of Hamilton.
The tension – and danger – was ratcheted up further when Verstappen and Hamilton crashed again at Monza in September, the shaken seven-times champion saying the halo on his cockpit had saved his life after the Red Bull bounced on top of the Mercedes in a chicane. “We don’t want a situation where … someone gets really hurt,” Wolff said.
The heat has risen steadily and Horner suggested Wolff was experiencing a new kind of pressure. “He came into the sport with Mercedes in 2013 and the structure was already in place,” Horner told McRae. “He’s never experienced anything other than winning. So it’s a different type of pressure now. It’s tough.”
Will Horner regret those words given the ruthlessness with which Hamilton – and Wolff – have roared back? During Friday’s media duties Horner produced the necessary lines about the season’s “amazing journey” and the excitement of a winner-takes-all race. But compared with Wolff, he looked tired and flat, no doubt privately annoyed at seeing Verstappen’s lead reduced to nothing. Wolff, meanwhile, looked genuinely relaxed, insisting he had not expected to be in contention for the drivers’ title after Verstappen won in Mexico. “Marvellous,” was how he described forcing a winner-takes-all decider. “We have only to gain.”
Wolff aimed to defuse tension – and perhaps take the sting out of questions – by shaking hands with Horner. “Good luck. May the best man and the best team win,” he smiled from behind his facemask, leaving little doubt as to who he thought was the best team. “It’s been intense between the two of us,” Horner said. “It’ll be intense next year, and the year after,” adding he was not planning to invite Wolff on holiday. Wolff pondered the idea briefly before coldly replying: “I don’t know if it would be so much fun.”
The pre-race mood appears civil, yet guarded. It remains to be seen whether Wolff and Horner will be shaking each other by the hand or by the throat in Abu Dhabi on Sunday.
