- Horner reacted to scandal with a jubilant promise to ‘f*** them all’ – the timing of the sacking reveals why F1’s morals are so skewed
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To the very end, the vastly self-confident Christian Horner clearly considered himself cock of the walk, a big shot and master of all he surveyed.
Just a week ago, he was walking the wide acres at Silverstone’s annual clay shooting event, near his country pile in Oxfordshire, with an air of absolute invincibility.
You can see why the man felt so untouchable, despite the rank underperformance this season of the Red Bull Racing team he has been running.
It’s not much more than a year since hundreds of WhatsApp messages, sent by him to a female member of staff, many of a sexual nature, dropped like kryptonite on F1 and were brushed off as a mild inconvenience.
For most people in public life, a data drop creating such a grubby and deeply unattractive picture would have been terminal.
If an employer did not consider the act of sending them to have brought the business into disrepute and immediately sacked the sender, then that individual would have found the embarrassment insufferable and walked.
Not Horner. Wealth, power, adoration, a country pile and celebrity wife like his clearly made him feel untouchable. You hire an expensive barrister, wait for an independent inquiry to absolve you, and the rest is history.
Well, we know quite a lot more about sport’s priorities today. No problem when there are allegations of sexual harassment and coercive, controlling behaviour.
Big problem when Max Verstappen is made to look like a very ordinary driver and Red Bull start to backfire. There you have it. The skewed moral compass of elite sport, writ large.
Horner no doubt felt that he had ironed things out with Verstappen after their hour’s chat with him on the bottom floor of Red Bull’s hospitality area at the Silverstone paddock entrance last week. But it turns out Red Bull were not willing to tolerate another afternoon of failure, on the Silverstone track.
Verstappen’s father, Jos, made it perfectly clear last year how deeply inappropriate he considered Horner’s nocturnal messaging to have been.
He, for one, will not be mourning this departure. One suspects Verstappen won’t either. He skipped that clay shoot with a stomach bug.
To some extent, Horner’s conduct last year has come back to bite him. It left him with less credit when things began to unravel on the rack and has been part of the consideration now – despite the Red Bull PR’s insistence, last year, that there was nothing to see. Red Bull are perfectly aware that, for all the talk about the investigation’s ‘independence’, those emails were reputationally damaging.
But please let no one labour under the illusion that they are anything but a peripheral consideration here. Had Red Bull and Verstappen been flying this season, that conduct would have been put right out of mind. Valuable material for episode one of the next season of Drive to Survive. Nothing more.
As Horner goes, the PR operation swings into action once more, with Red Bull’s Oliver Mintzlaff thanking Horner today for his ‘exceptional work’ over the last 20 years and informing us that he will be ‘forever remain an important part of our team history.’
The eight drivers’ championships and six constructors’ championships he brought, through Verstappen and Sebastian Vettel, are certainly something. But the WhatsApp cache is the shadow on the wall. A very obstinate stain.
Horner, the big timer, was extremely sure that the negative press would quickly be reduced to dust. Verstappen’s win in Bahrain last season made him feel huge personal vindication.
‘That’s the best (way) to f*** them all,’ was his charming observation. ‘Shut the f*** up.’ Well, the past has caught up with him now. A year too late, he is discovering what comeuppance looks like.
