Red Bull boss Christian Horner adds his own spice to F1 rivalries

Last week, a hot rumour swept through Melbourne.

On the eve of the Australian Grand Prix, Christian Horner, principal of the extraordinarily successful Formula 1 team Oracle Red Bull Racing, was heading for Cherry Bar, the iconic, raucous rock ’n’ roll venue on Little Collins Street.

Christian Horner (left) celebrates with 2021 F1 World Drivers at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix last December.Credit: Getty Images

Horner, 49, who has led the team to five constructors’ and six drivers’ championships, stars in the absorbing Netflix series Drive to Survive, is married to ex-Spice Girl Geri Halliwell and has eclipsed the profile of many of the sport’s supposed stars: the drivers.

And while it turned out Horner did not join Red Bull’s global executive team — who own the Formula 1 racing team — at the bar, the fact that celebrity watchers would even get excited about the Englishman says a lot about where the sport, which traditionally attracted billionaires and petrolheads, is right now.

In short, it is everywhere.

The sport’s steep growth is regarded as a marvel: it is labelled an “unstoppable brand” and the subject of glowing profiles in Forbes and Harvard Business Review.

Horner himself is the subject of similarly glowing profiles.

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner (middle) has become a fan favourite thanks to his passionate outbursts.Credit: Netflix

“Christian knows what he is doing and knows what he wants,” says Paul Stoddart, the Melbourne-born businessman who owned his own F1 team, Minardi, from 2001 to 2005. He says the world is different now, but the role of the principal remains the same.

“The basic role is you are the boss. The reality is the good ones get it right by getting a good team around them.”

He cites among Horner’s successes his key hire of design genius Adrian Newey — poached from McLaren in Red Bull’s second year — as key to producing the team’s fast cars, which are powered by engines from other companies.

“The good ones go onto great success and the bad ones fade away,” Stoddart says.

Much has been made of the Netflix series raising the profile of F1, but the entire competition is owned by a media company, Liberty Media (which has also boosted the sport’s fan-base).

Drive to Survive may have catapulted Horner into the celebrity ranks, but it has also done something else entirely: It has turned him into content. Red Bull even has its own Global Head of Factual Entertainment.

Thus when Oracle Red Bull put out a fun clip to its 10 million Instagram followers recently where its star drivers, including Max Verstappen and Australia’s former Red Bull driver Daniel Ricciardo, chose their favourite music artists, up popped Horner, who had a very simple answer on his pop pick: “My wife.”

Horner and his wife, former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, at the FIA Prize Giving Ceremony in Paris in 2021.Credit: AP

Controversial former F1 chief Bernie Ecclestone introduced Horner and Halliwell at a race in 2010, when both were in relationships with other people. They married in 2015 and have a child together, as well as one child each from previous relationships.

Halliwell was a bit of a car nut (her dad was a car dealer) and had told her beau about her first car, a much-prized 1964 MGB GT she had regretted selling when she left the Spice Girls and sold everything to start her life anew. Horner tracked the car down to its owner in Scotland, bought it back and presented it to her on her 44th birthday.

The couple live in London and have a house in the country, where they relax with a stable of race horses (competition again, but this time as a hobby), a few of which were named after Geri’s hit songs.

“He appears to be like a bad boy but he is really nice and charming,” said one woman who has met Horner socially but declines to go on the record due to internal F1 politics.

“Of course, a lot of people are charming in Formula 1. It’s a sexy sport.”

They are also highly competitive. “The famous words ‘piranha club’ are not used lightly,” Stoddart says. “It’s dog-eat-dog and their teeth are pretty sharp.”

In January 2005, when Red Bull came into existence after the energy drink company bought the Jaguar team, Horner was the youngest principal, aged 31. Now he is the oldest, and longest in the role, and has knocked back the offer of a fortune to defect to Ferrari.

During that time, Red Bull has had only one principal and won the constructors’ world championship five times, while Ferrari has had six principals and won the title once.

Journalists describe Horner as friendly but not warm, with a knack for deflecting questions.

He started go-karting aged 12 and got up in the middle of the night to watch his idol, Nigel Mansell, race in the Adelaide Grand Prix in 1986 and lose the world championship after his tyre blew out.

British motor racing legend Nigel Mansell’s world championship dream is ended as his left rear tyre blows out at the 1986 Adelaide Grand Prix.Credit: AAP

Horner raced in Formula Renault, Formula 2 and Formula 3000 before retiring aged 25, telling London’s Daily Telegraph he felt out of his depth: “I decided I wanted to run the team as I would like to have driven for the team.”

This year, the F1 circus has been to Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, and after Melbourne this weekend, heads to Azerbaijan and then Miami.

Red Bull superstar Verstappen is locked in a duel with Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton, but equally high-profile is Horner’s rivalry with Mercedes-AMG Petronas boss Toto Wolff, which is so intense that Wolff once brought a barrister to a race in the expectation of launching a legal challenge to a race decision.

“It is Red Bull’s to lose,” says Stoddart. “They have the fastest car by a second a lap and fantastic drivers, particularly Max Verstappen. All things being equal, they should romp in both [drivers’ and constructors’] championships.

“People like Christian and Franz Tost, of my old team Scuderia AlphaTauri, they don’t have any [financial] interest in the team but they are passionate about the team. First of all, you have to be passionate, second you need knowledge, and third you have to be self-aware enough to know you can’t do it on your own.”

Whichever team gets the chequered flag on Sunday, the real winner will once again be Formula 1.