Just shy of six weeks ago, Christian Horner was asked about a rumour that he’d been contacted by Ferrari asking whether he’d be interested in moving to Maranello to become team principal.
Unlike so many of his answers about prickly subjects in recent years, Horner’s reply was unequivocal.
“My commitment, 100 per cent, is with Red Bull,” he said. “It always has been and certainly will be for the long term.”
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The answer was totally unsurprising. Horner was the only team principal the team had ever had. Every race win, every championship, had been scored on his watch, and from next season Red Bull Racing is set to become a works constructor thanks to a powertrains program he himself had spearheaded.
Now is not the time for wavering; now is the time for total commitment.
Evidently Red Bull didn’t feel the same way
EMERGENCY PIT TALK PODCAST – Christian Horner sacked! Why & what’s next for Red Bull?
ess than six weeks after Horner’s definitive declaration, the long-time team principal and CEO has been turfed from his dual role in Milton Keynes effective immediately.
Laurent Mekies, the Racing Bulls team principal, will present at the Belgian Grand Prix later this month as the new Red Bull Racing chief executive.
‘CAME AS A SHOCK’: Horner exit speech leaked as sacked Red Bull boss speaks over blindsiding
Formula 1 doesn’t keep secrets well, and this bombshell was a real surprise. Staff were reportedly told on Wednesday that the axe had swung, and shortly afterwards the company made public that it had released Horner from his duties.
No reason was given. According to Sky Sports commentator Martin Brundle, no reason was given to Horner either.
Horner’s farewell speech to Milton Keynes, that leaked hours later, still offered no further insight, other than confirmation he was blindsided.
“It came as a shock to myself,” Horner said.
“A new CEO will be announced shortly. I trust him and give him my full support.
“My instruction to him is to look after all of you.
“I have fought hard, I’ve done my best, I’ve put in a big shift and it now comes to a close.”
But there’s no shortage of possible reasons that the man once integral to the team’s success has been so suddenly shuffled to the exit door.
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RED BULL GIVETH YOU WINGS, RED BULL TAKETH WINGS AWAY
The beginning of Red Bull Racing’s decline has a date: 22 October 2022.
It’s the day Red Bull co-founder Dietrich Mateschitz died.
Mateschitz was the eccentric Austrian businessman who found Thai energy drink Krating Daeng worked wonders for his jet lag. Together with the drink’s inventor, Chaleo Yoovidhya, he launched the Red Bull energy drink in the 1980s. It quickly became the market leader, and both Mateschitz and Yoovidhya became multibillionaires.
The structure they set when the company was founded in 1984 would be relevant to Red Bull Racing in 2022.
By agreement Mateschitz ran the business but owned only 49 per cent of the shares. Yoovidhya owned the same percentage, with his son, Chalerm, owning the 2 per cent difference.
When Chaleo died in 2012. Chalerm became the 51 per cent majority owner.
That made no difference while Mateschitz remained at the helm, but these became the seeds of Red Bull Racing’s decline upon his passing.
Mateschitz had ensured Red Bull Racing wanted for nothing, but he was otherwise a hands-off owner. He entrusted Horner to run the team from day one and contracted motorsport adviser Helmut Marko to liaise between them.
It was an ideal set-up that allowed the team to flourish, leaving the racing decisions to the racers without the need to justify themselves to administrators.
That changed in 2022, when Mateschitz’s unimpeachable authority died with him.
The power vacuum instantly factionalised the team.
In one corner was Horner, who had the backing of the Thai majority ownership.
In the other was Marko, Mateschitz’s right-hand man, who counted alongside him Dietrich’s son, Marko Mateschitz, and corporate projects and new investments CEO Oliver Mintzlaff, who has long been believed to have wanted to make changes to the team.
Marko also counted Max Verstappen as one of his party.
Verstappen’s rapid rise to Formula 1 came thanks to Marko’s total loyalty to his cause. When rumours spread that Marko was set to be axed from the business early last year, Verstappen intervened by tying his own future with the business to the Austrian’s ongoing tenure.
Marko stayed.
Verstappen’s allegiance became problematic for Horner last year, when he became embroiled in a scandal of inappropriate workplace behaviour.
He always denied wrongdoing, and two internal investigations led by external lawyers exonerated him.
The complainant has escalated the mater to a UK workplace tribunal for a hearing in 2026.
The vulnerability was ruthlessly exploited by Jos Verstappen, Max’s father, who almost immediately called for Horner’s head, declaring that the team was being “torn apart” and would “explode” if the Englishman remained in charge.
But Horner was safe with the backing of Red Bull’s majority ownership. It was the ultimate trump card.
That protection, however, was not unlimited.
Evidently the Yoovidhya family has withdrawn its support.
This is the most likely trigger, because with Horner having another half-decade to run on his contract as team principal and CEO, terminating him would not have been cheap.
It’s the sort of decision that would have to have been made at the very highest level of the business, which appears to have lost faith in his leadership.
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VERSTAPPEN CONTRACT RUMOURS THE LIKELY TRIGGER
But why would the Yoovidhya family have lost faith now?
Why not last year during Horner’s workplace scandal? Or why not next season, when it’ll be clear whether Horner’s big-bucks gamble on an internal power unit has paid off?
To sack the only team principal Red Bull Racing has ever had in the middle of the season — not even at the mid-season break — and without any fanfare to match his achievements suggests urgency.
It’s impossible not to connect Horner’s shock exit with the intensifying speculation over Verstappen’s future.
While last year’s rumours of a potential Verstappen quit threat were linked to the political situation at the team, this year’s they’re linked directly to performance and direction.
After setting records for domination in 2023, the team fell to third in last year’s championship and is currently fourth in the 2025 constructors title standings.
Verstappen is almost entirely helpless in his title defence this year as Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris romp away to a healthy lead at the top of the drivers championship.
George Russell blew the whistle on Mercedes-Verstappen discussions as the explanation for delayed negotiations on his own expiring deal, and Toto Wolff has admitted talks are happening.
Verstappen’s appeal is clear as a four-time world champion and the most talented driver of his generation.
But for Red Bull Racing his significance is far greater.
The team needs him.
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His points alone won the team the 2023 constructors title as Sergio Pérez struggled to finish second in the most dominant car in Formula 1 history. He won last year’s drivers championship despite the team finishing third.
Only 11 times prior had the winner of the drivers and constructors championship come from different garages, and only twice had the drivers champion driven for a team that finished outside the top two on the constructors title table.
This year the need is even more dire.
Red Bull Racing is fourth in the standings. It’s 38 points behind Mercedes in third and 50 points behind Ferrari in second.
Verstappen has scored 165 of the team’s 172 points. Yuki Tsunoda has contributed just seven to the cause.
Without Verstappen, Red Bull Racing would be last in the constructors championship.
It’s therefore imperative that Red Bull Racing retain Verstappen — no matter the cost.
It suggests one of two conclusions.
The Red Bull board faced the prospect of losing Verstappen or losing Horner — such has become the personal animus between Jos Verstappen and Horner in particular — and chose the latter to lock down the former.
Or Verstappen has already decided to leave, and Horner must carry the can for killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.
If either is true, it would be painfully ironic.
Horner has spent the better part of the last decade centring Red Bull Racing around Verstappen such that it now orbits the Dutchman.
Yet he might now have been felled by a massive powerplay out of the Verstappen camp — a camp he has done more than perhaps anyone else to vest with strength.
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BUT RED BULL RACING’S LONG DECLINE MATTERS TOO
Perhaps Horner would have been more secure in his place had the last two years on his watch not been so chaotic — and had that chaos not contrasted so harshly with the obliteration of the field in 2023.
The workplace scandal was only part of it, but it triggered a series of falling dominoes that left him further weakened.
It was part of the reason legendary designer Adrian Newey abandoned his post as chief technical officer last May. Reportedly that tied in with the feeling that Horner wasn’t giving him enough credit for his stewardship of the technical department in favour of other technical leaders.
Newey has won titles wherever he goes in Formula 1. Crucially, however, every team he leaves stops winning. The only team to have won a title in its post-Newey era is McLaren, which before last year’s constructors championship had claimed just one drivers title in the 19 years since the Briton left the team.
Sergio Pérez, ousted at the end of last season, told the Desde el Paddock podcast last month that there was a clear correlation between Newey’s departure and the team’s downfall.
“I think we had a great team,” Pérez said. “In the end, it gradually fell apart … when Adrian left.
“That’s when the problems really started.”
Newey wasn’t the only one to leave, however.
Sporting director Jonathan Wheatley quit the team late last year to take up the role of team principal at Sauber this season, which will become the Audi works squad next year.
Wheatley has been followed to Sauber by former Verstappen chief mechanic Lee Stevenson, who’s reportedly one of a swag of Red Bull Racing defectors to the Swiss squad — and you can just look at Sauber’s much-improved pit stop performances as a sign of RBR influence.
Chief strategist Will Courtenay also announced his departure late last year to become McLaren’s sporting director.
They followed chief designer Rob Marshall, who left the team at the end of 2023 to join McLaren early last year.
On the track things have been uglier.
Horner chose to re-sign Pérez early last year in what he described as an attempt to boost the Mexican’s confidence. If anything, it had the opposite effect, with Pérez’s form soon becoming so dire that the team paid him out at the end of last season, before the new deal had even come into effect.
Pérez’s downfall looked even worse after Horner — together with other Red Bull heavyweights — had decided at the mid-season break not to promote Daniel Ricciardo to the seat, precipitating not only the team’s failed title defence but also Ricciardo’s unworthy exit from the sport some months later.
Pérez was replaced by Liam Lawson, who had only 11 grand prix starts to his name. By now Red Bull Racing knew how difficult its car was to drive for anyone other than Verstappen, and it could also see that Yuki Tsunoda was in seemingly constantly improving form, but for reasons of internal politics — some say Horner saw Tsunoda as too much of a Marko pick — Lawson was given the nod ahead of the more experienced Japanese ace.
Then, when Lawson struggled badly in the first two rounds, he too was turfed — in a high-profile and embarrassing manoeuvre — with Tsunoda finally given his chance.
It was a move Verstappen is believed to have been unhappy with given the team appeared to scapegoat a young driver rather than accept the depth of its own problems.
But Tsunoda’s struggles — he’s the fifth driver in a row since Daniel Ricciardo to fail alongside Verstappen — have finally turned the spotlight on a team incapable of fielding a driver beside the Dutchman.
While there’s no clear single reason for the car’s difficult traits, the team arrived here with Horner’s philosophical guidance.
“It was amazing when I met up with Christian the first time in person [in 2020] he said to me, “Look, we’re a team that runs two cars because we have to run two cars. We could easily race with just Max’,” Pérez recounted to Desde el Paddock.
“So I said to him, ‘Well, now we can race with two cars. Hire me!’, and he laughed.
“From that moment on, I understood a lot about how the team worked.”
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WHAT HAPPENS NOW?
This is a perilous moment for Red Bull Racing. It’s a significant change.
Horner’s name has never been above the door, but he’s synonymous with the brand — and every element of it.
The post-Mateschitz power rebalance had him oversighting as much of the team as possible. That included the new powertrains division, which will deliver Red Bull Racing its first works engine next year in partnership with Ford.
There are long-running rumours that it’s behind the curve, although these are impossible to verify before the cars hit the track next year.
The new motor will combine with a new wind tunnel and other facilities to usher in the dawn of Red Bull Racing’s new era — an era over which Horner will now not preside.
That Horner was so involved as team principal and CEO may ultimately have been to his detriment but was also a strength. Red Bull Racing thrived on having a clean, traditional team structure that didn’t have to justify itself by any metric other than performance.
Horner called the shots. The buck stopped — and has stopped — with him.
Laurent Mekies will replace him as chief executive, though his announcement does not describe him as team principal.
If Red Bull Racing ends up with a more complicated corporate structure — one, for example, more integrated with the Red Bull brand in Austria — it will be to its detriment.
So too will it be detrimental if Horner’s sacking has been made to simply appease the Verstappen camp. If the Dutch faction can trigger a team boss’s downfall, over what other positions will it have power, and on what basis would those decisions be made?
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Interest in Verstappen’s future is now more intense than at any other time this season.
The decision to stay at or leave the team was set to come to a head at the mid-season break, when Mercedes boss Toto Wolff signalled he would decide on his 2026 driver line-up. Surely this announcement means Verstappen’s timeline has been brought forward — it’s hard to believe Horner would have been dropped without a decision one way or another on the team’s most important asset.
Verstappen’s manager, Ray Vermeulen, didn’t deny involvement when speaking to De Telegraaf, the Dutch paper close to the four-time champion.
“We were informed in advance by Red Bull’s management that this decision had been made,” Vermeulen said. “It’s up to Red Bull to provide further explanation regarding the reasons.
“We continue to focus on the sporting side and are looking for more performance so we can return to the top. In that respect, nothing changes.”
As for Horner, the man who instrumentally built Red Bull Racing from a wallowing minnow into a modern powerhouse, delivering 124 wins and 14 world titles, he will surely find a place in Formula 1 if he wants one.
He played the political game hard and burnt some bridges, but there’s no other way to play in Formula 1, and he remains respected in most parts of the paddock.
Rumours connecting him to Ferrari and the under-pressure Frédéric Vasseur’s job will likely return with gusto.
It enlivens the prospect of an almost unbelievable scenario: Horner as Lewis Hamilton’s team principal racing against Max Verstappen in a Toto Wolff-managed team.
It would be an interesting experiment. The Red Bull Racing that Horner built operates in a totally different environment to Ferrari. Success is not guaranteed — just ask the litany of principals to have left Maranello empty-handed.
Whatever he chooses and whatever the case, he would know deep down that all dynasties must end eventually.
He just wouldn’t have expected his to end quite like this.
