During the most dominant stages of Max Verstappen’s time at Red Bull, Christian Horner says it was, in many ways, the unhappiest time of his Formula 1 career.
Christian Horner served as Red Bull Team Principal for 20 years before leaving the team in 2025 after a slew of performance struggles and scandals. In his tenure, he won many championships with the team, including four titles with Verstappen, including his incredibly dominant run throughout the 2023 and 2024 seasons.
‘Incredibly sad’ departure
The conditions under which Horner left the team were clouded by discord. Yet he said that, not long after his dismissal, he felt relief, which came down to how the team had changed.
“I think, obviously, tension had grown, things had changed, and it just felt very, very different from when I came into the sport, into the team,” Horner said on the High Performance podcast.
“And when I got in the car, and I left that meeting, I called Geri, my wife, explained what happened, and you just feel like the world’s been almost taken off your shoulders.”
Of course, Horner admitted he felt ‘incredibly sad’ about leaving the team he’d spent so much of his career with and found such success. He also admitted he had been unhappy for some time.
“Incredibly sad, and as I drove back up the M40 home, I had a chance to reflect a little. But if I’m really honest with myself, and if you spoke to my wife, there was a time when we were winning a huge amount, and she said, ‘I’ve never seen you so unhappy.’
“It’s almost like you get to the top of the mountain, and you realise there’s nothing there.
“It was that kind of feeling, and obviously a huge amount of pressure in a sport that is so visible as well.”
The internal battles at Red Bull
A lot of the friction within the team allegedly came from the various factions that formed after Dietrich Mateschitz, Red Bull co-founder, passed away. Even as the team broke records with their dominance, infighting over who would control the team continued.
Horner noted that Mateschitz’s death was a turning point.
“I think it’s all relative, and it applies across so many different aspects of life,” he said. “That if you’re happy in yourself, if you’re happy in your work, then everything’s just easier.”
“And there’s been an awful lot of change, obviously within the team, within the overall business, and then different pressures are settling down as to what does the new world after the passing of the founder, Dietrich Mateschitz, look like?
“Inevitably, it was always going to be different from that moment onwards. And rather than being able to focus on just the racing, suddenly your energy, your focus gets consumed by managing other elements and other relationships and politics, which inevitably happen within many different organisations.”
READ MORE: F1 set to discuss ‘ADUO for teams’ cost cap rule overhaul
Discussion about this post