TIL #86: Better To Reign In Hell
Christian Horner Gets Dropped Mid-Season
The Installation Lap is a weekly Substack column dedicated to helping Americans develop a deeper appreciation for Formula 1.
On July 9th, after 20 years, eight driver’s titles, six constructors’ titles, 124 wins, 107 pole positions, and 287 podiums, Christian Horner was fired from Red Bull Racing. The team he took over from Jaguar, and rebuilt into a dominant, front-running Formula 1 team.
It is not at all uncommon for an F1 Team Principal to hear those magic words, “You’re fired.” This sort of thing happens all the time in Formula 1. Alpine, as we’ve discussed at length, has had four Team Principals in five years. The average length of stay for a Ferrari Team Principal is just under three years. Fred Vasseur is currently bumping up against this historic Ferrari timeline, hence the recent flood of rumors and news articles about his future at the Scuderia. Corporate boards and CEO’s have an incredibly difficult time navigating Formula 1, and so when things aren’t going well, they tend to pull the only lever they can think of: they get rid of the boss.
What’s the catch?
The catch is that success in F1 takes a lot of time and a lot of money. And due to the nature of Formula 1 racing teams, having a single person with a lot of political and financial power at their disposal has, historically, proved to be the best way to get to the top of the sport. A single boss with a lot of power gives an F1 team the ability to make expensive decisions quickly. If you have, for example, followed a dead-end development path, a powerful team boss can say, “Bin it all. Let’s try something else,” at a morning meeting, and by lunch time, engineers could be retracing their steps and doing the hard work of plotting a new course. By contrast, if your F1 team has a leader who has to ask permission and get approval from a corporate board, that can take time. Days, weeks, even months. Think of the performance penalty a corporate-run team would pay if it had to wait months to change course. When a month could represent three races, the headlines surrounding your team could suddenly be using the words “chaos” or “downward spiral.” Corporate boards don’t like that, and so they might try and fire the Team Principal who led the team down that useless development path in the first place.
Corporate interference, as it is often called in F1 circles, has doomed more F1 projects than any lame-ass power unit or crash-prone rookie driver.
Toyota and BMW both famously tried their hands at Formula 1 and failed in spectacular fashion because their boardrooms insisted on having control over those teams and consequently made a mess of it. Audi, which has officially joined F1 but has yet to turn a wheel in anger, has already had a leadership shake-up which saw Andreas Seidl and Oliver Hoffman leave the project to be replaced by ex-Ferrari man Mattia Binotto and ex-Red Bull superstar Jonathan Wheatley. Ferrari, after the Todt/Brawn/Schumacher era, drunk off a five-year run of championships, fell victim to hubris. Stefano Domenicali thought, way back in 2007, “You know what would be better than winning? Winning with an entirely Italian team.” Ferrari hasn’t won a championship of any kind in eighteen years. Ross Brawn won another championship in a broke-ass nothing of a team he bought for a dollar just two years later. Better to rein in hell than serve in the winner’s circle.
TIL has written extensively on the circus that is Alpine F1. The endless and well-documented struggles of that team can all be traced back to corporate interference. The Renault board wants success; they want it now, and they are willing to fire anyone to prove that. Porsche, very recently, had their once-a-decade flirtation with Formula 1 and were in talks with Red Bull about a partnership. Why didn’t that deal happen? Porsche wanted too much corporate control. This is from an article in Motorsport about that potential deal,
“For Porsche those evaluations involved a link-up with Red Bull that ultimately foundered because, it said, the partnership it sought based on an “equal footing” could not be achieved.”
Corporate boards want control because F1 is insanely expensive, and it’s their company’s name on the car. Team Principals need control because F1 is incredibly complex, fast-moving, and difficult beyond comprehension.
The most successful Formula 1 Team Principals of all time are Frank Williams (nine constructors’ titles), Ron Dennis (seven constructors’ titles), Jean Todt (six constructors’ titles), Toto Wolff (eight consecutive constructors’ titles), and Christian Horner (six constructors’ titles).
What do those Team Principals have in common? Frank Williams founded and owned his team. Ron Dennis was a co-owner of McLaren. Toto Wolff is 1/3 owner of Mercedes AMG F1 with his partners Mercedes-Benz and INEOS. Jean Todt had the complete support and protection of Ferrari CEO Luca di Montezemolo, just as Christian Horner had the loyalty and protection of Red Bull founders Dietrich Mateschitz and Chaleo Yoovidhya.
When Dietrich and Chaleo founded Red Bull in 1984, they agreed on an equal 49% split in the share holdings. The remaining 2% was given to Chaleo’s son, Chalerm Yoovidhya, who had kept that 2% share for over four decades. This simple arrangement for a sports drink company formed the foundation of Christian Horner’s power base in Formula 1. That base began to crumble on October 22nd, 2022, when Dietrich Mateschitz passed away.
Over the past few days, the story of Christian Horner’s shock departure from Red Bull has congealed into a death by a thousand cuts story. From the death of Dietrich, to the never-ending mismanagement drama of the second Red Bull car, the multi-million dollar pay out to Sergio Perez to get him out of that cursed second car, to the dividing of the Red Bull team and company into factions on the heels of Christian Horner’s 2024 sexual harassment scandal (Horner was accused of inappropriate behavior with a female Red Bull employee, he was investigated and cleared of those charges) with Oliver Mintzlaff (CEO Corporate Projects and Investments at Red Bull), and Helmut Marko on the Austrian side and Christian Horner and Chalerm Yoovidhya on the Thai side. It’s notable that Jos Verstappen, Max’s father, was aligned with this Austrian side of the company. Finally, there has been the frightening exodus of top-tier F1 talent from Red Bull. In the past two years Red Bull has lost Lee Stevenson, Verstappen’s Chief Mechanic (Sauber/Audi), Will Courtenay, Head of Strategy (McLaren), Rob Marshall (McLaren), Jonathan Wheatley (Sauber/Audi), and the greatest F1 car designer of all-time Adrian Newey (Aston Martin). These are not losses in the normal churn of talent throughout the paddock. These are F1 hall-of-famers Red Bull has seen exit the team for greener pastures. Sprinkle atop all that loathing and innuendo the persistent and growing chorus of rumors of late pointing to a Max Verstappen to Mercedes move, and something had to give.
It appears now that it was all too much. The center could not hold. From Fortune.com,
“On May 20, Chalerm transferred that stake to Fides Trustees SA, a Geneva-based trust company, according to an Austrian regulatory filing published to the corporate registry on Monday.”
It would appear that after a raft of political injuries, bombs being lobbed in the press by known Horner-hater Jos Verstappen, and finally this transfer of Red Bull ownership stake by Yoovidhya, Horner was left exposed to the point that the King could finally be deposed. In a corporate-run team, any one of those transgressions would have been enough to see Horner marched to the guillotine. In a dictatorship, it took all of those factors combined to dislodge Horner.
The big question still hanging over this incredible move by Red Bull to axe Horner is, why now? The timing of Horner’s termination is peculiar, to say the least.
Savor the weirdness. Red Bull, after acing the 2022 regulation change, won three drivers’ titles and two constructors ’ titles on the bounce, including one of the single most successful seasons, 2023, for any F1 team, ever. Moreover, the 2026 regulation change is fully underway. Designs are being finalized, cars are being built, wind tunnels are getting blustery. Under Horner’s leadership, Red Bull will be partnering up with Ford to build their own engines, in-house for the first time ever. Christian Horner is the person who has planned, engineered, and executed these massive structural changes to the team, and now, with deadlines looming and designs being finalized for the brave new world of 2026, he is gone. Why do that?
One meta theme of the work we’ve done here at The Installation Lap has been to articulate the gravity that F1 history exerts on the paddock. There are places where that gravity is weak. Think of the survival and relative success of the Haas team. They have defied F1 history with their pluck. Or consider Red Bull’s fall from power within a rules regime that they had previously dominated. That hasn’t happened very often in F1. Winners often win big until the rules change. Then there are places where the gravity of F1 history is so intense as to create a singularity. Think of Williams’ decades at the back of the grid after dominating the sport in the 90s. Think of Renault and Ferrari wandering in the desert for decades after spurts of F1 dominance. Think of Mercedes' four years in purgatory after winning eight consecutive Constructors’ titles and seven drivers’ titles. Once you are knocked off the top of the mountain, it can take years, decades, to climb back to the top. Red Bull might win another race this year. But if you’re a Red Bull fan, I would prepare for a long day’s journey into night.
I like Christian Horner more than most F1 fans like Christian Horner, and I hate Christian Horner. He is a wanker. And not the garden variety wanker you run into out in the world, the kind who has public conversations on speaker phone, or doesn’t use their turn signal. Horner is a magnificent, best-of-breed, world-class wanker. He is fierce, arrogant, competitive, deliberately obtuse, and a spoiled snob. And those are some of his best qualities. He is also a highly effective and brilliant Formula 1 operator. In short, he is the kind of wanker you would want on your team and the kind of wanker you are loath to compete against.
There is almost nobody in the paddock who has ever accomplished anything on the scale of what Horner has done at Red Bull. He built a train-wreck of a team, in Ford’s old Jaguar squad, up from nothing into a dominant force in F1. That team then fell off the top of the sport for nearly a decade, and he built them back into winners once again. Those accomplishments in F1 are superhuman. For all the big talk, big money, and big plans of the other F1 teams, nobody but Toto Wolff and his Mercedes squad has done anything even close to that. Sauber has been at the back of the grid, always. Alpine has been a joke since 2007. Racing Bulls were built entirely without winning as a goal and have still managed to win two races in 25 years. Williams, as mentioned, has been out of the spotlight for a generation. Aston Martin, for all of Lawrence Stroll's billions, has yet to bear even the most meager of fruits. Ferrari, a perennial F1 front-runner, has been championship-less for the last 18 years, and Mercedes is currently enduring the fourth year and counting of a hangover from their incredible winning era. Horner made Red Bull Racing what it is. While the folks at corporate might feel relieved that Christian and his dominant, centralized, dictatorial power are gone, I don’t think they have any idea as to the depth of the historical gravity well of pain and suffering they’ve just stepped into.
Red Bull will not be a front-running team for many years to come. All due respect to the new Red Bull Team Principal, Laurent Mekies, but it is going to take a long time to clean up this mess.
That brings us to Maximillian Verstappen.
What does Max want, and where can he get it? Max wants a fast car, wins, and championships. That’s easy enough. Jos Verstappen got what he wanted, as ever. Christian is gone. If one reason among many for Christian Horner’s termination was the threat of losing Max to Mercedes, why would Max now stay at Red Bull? What remains there for him? Are Red Bull, sans Horner, now a better team and better positioned for 2026? Will their brand-new engine department build a world-beater the first time out? That doesn’t seem at all likely. They have hemorrhaged talent, they no longer have the fastest car, and they’ve just fired one of the most successful team bosses of all time. If, however, Christian Horner was fired because Red Bull has already lost Max to Mercedes, then Red Bull is well and truly in a world of pain. The good news is that without Max, they will have two cars finishing closer together. The bad news? Those finishes might be the last two places on the grid, as Yuki Tsunoda demonstrated by finishing P15 and last at the British Grand Prix. Unless, of course, Red Bull can find a way to defy gravity.
Here, we are stepping off the merry-go-round a bit.
There is an Instagram account that tracks the comings and goings of Max Verstappen’s private jet. No, I’m not joking.
The account, @verstappenjet, reported on Friday, July 11th, that Max Verstappen’s private jet landed on the island of Sardinia for 5 hours and 22 minutes. How could it possibly matter that Max stopped in Sardinia? It matters because Ralf Schumacher confirmed to German Formula 1 publication formel1.de that Toto Wolff was in Sardinia on his yacht.
This is what it looks like when a Formula 1 empire crumbles. All of a sudden, we are tracking private jets and looking for yachts in the Mediterranean.
The next flood of big news we are all holding our collective breath for is a game of who goes where. Where does Max go? Where does George Russell go? Where does Christian Horner go?
If Max goes to Mercedes, I honestly don’t know what happens to George. Sneaking into Aston Martin, somehow, would look to be his best bet. It pains me to think that, during his best season in F1 to date, Toto would cut George loose after so many years of support. A stop-gap year with Red Bull, just to stay on the grid, could be possible. It could also be possible that Toto decides to pair George and Max together. I don’t know why he would do that. Who needs the heartburn? But it is possible. Lewis is at Ferrari, and Christian Horner has been fired from Red Bull. Anything is possible at this point.
Christian Horner has been linked with both Ferrari and Alpine. A Ferrari move seems very unlikely. While Ferrari is reported to have made a grab for Horner’s services several years ago, Horner uprooting life in the UK and going into a situation where he would have to operate under the infamously inscrutable Ferrari corporate structure feels like a stretch. Not many people get stabbed in the back and then go take a management job at the knife factory. Alpine, at the moment, looks to be the most likely spot for Christian to land. Two of F1’s greatest “villains,” Horner and Flavio Briatore, together certainly send a chill down the spine. The chaos at Alpine of late isn’t necessarily a deal breaker for someone like Horner, who has successfully built and rebuilt a Formula 1 team before. The caveat to a deal at Alpine is that next year, Alpine will be switching to Mercedes power units. It is difficult to imagine Christian Horner and Toto Wolff working together in any capacity.
To Toto Wolff or any other team chasing after the services of Max Verstappen: Be careful what you wish for.
If I were an F1 Team Principal eager to sign Max, I would put it in Max’s contract and pay any price, and bear any burden to ensure that Jos Verstappen was legally barred from setting foot inside my garage.
If you’re winning races but Jos is slowly sliding a knife into your kidneys, are you really winning?
This is supremely well written stuff my man