F1's Christian Horner: ‘Lewis Hamilton is a Marmite character. He isn’t everybody’s cup of tea’

Christian Horner at Red Bull Racing, near Milton Keynes. He is wearing a Heuer Heritage Calibre Heuer 02 watch by TAG Heuer (tagheuer.co.uk)
Christian Horner at Red Bull Racing, near Milton Keynes. He is wearing a Heuer Heritage Calibre Heuer 02 watch by TAG Heuer Credit:  Jamie McGregor Smith

Christian Horner was barely 11 years old when he started his first motor-racing venture. It was, admittedly, a small operation compared with what he’s used to now. The budget was limited, at precisely £0. The team head count was one: Christian Horner. The test track wasn’t really a track, but just a particularly good hill behind his parents’ home in Warwickshire. And as for the car, well, he did what he could. 

‘I built a kind of go-kart out of some old pram wheels from the tip, got a fruit-picking box to use as the seat and some rope to act as the steering wheel,’ he remembers, with a touch of pride. ‘I was just fascinated with speed.’

Horner is now 44, and still sending flimsy-looking vehicles round courses as quickly as he can, even if on a slightly different scale. As team principal of Red Bull Racing, one of the most successful and exciting outfits Formula One has seen this century, Horner commands an army of nearly 800 engineers, designers, drivers and support staff across almost 30 departments.

The go-kart has moved on a little, too. Its place has been taken by multimillion-pound carbon-fibre horizontal rocket ships easily capable of more than 200mph and carrying some of the most advanced technology in motoring. Those are Horner’s toys now, and making sure they win is his job. He’s undeniably good at it, too.

In 2005, when he and the team entered F1, he was by far the youngest manager in the history of the sport, yet a dozen years later he’s one of its most recognisable and respected figures, having built a legacy some observers believe puts him in the same bracket as legendary names such as Enzo Ferrari, Sir Frank Williams and Mercedes-Benz’s Alfred Neubauer. Red Bull, meanwhile, has exceeded all expectations.

Christian Horner 
Christian Horner at Red Bull Racing, near Milton Keynes Credit:  Jamie McGregor Smith

Once dismissed by traditionalists as unserious party animals paid for by a fizzy drink, from 244 race starts in 13 seasons the team has recorded 55 wins, 58 pole positions, four drivers’ championships (all through Sebastian Vettel), four constructors’ championships and almost 4,000 points.

The most recent of those came three weeks ago, when the 2017 season ended in Abu Dhabi. After 20 Grands Prix in 20 countries, Red Bull finished the year third, while its drivers, Australian Daniel Ricciardo and Dutchman Max Verstappen, finished fifth and sixth overall. A respectable season, by most standards, but Red Bull – and Horner – have become fairly used to winning. 

We meet two days after Abu Dhabi, at Red Bull’s F1 factory near Milton Keynes. For the next few months, until the travelling circus starts again in March, Horner will be based here. In his Aston Martin, the commute from his home in Oxfordshire, which he shares with his wife of two years, Geri (neé Halliwell), the former Spice Girl (of whom more later), is short and sweet. In contrast, the site is vast.

Comprising half a dozen huge buildings for everything from a car ‘hall of fame’ to Nasa- standard research labs, Red Bull Racing shares its business-park space with several other companies, including a producer of gourmet bacon and Fragilistics, a mirror delivery company.

Red Bull intends to buy them out at some point. Horner normally gets to his office at 9am, and did so today. He has debriefed the staff about the race in Abu Dhabi and seems keen to move on from the weekend. ‘We had a faster car, but we couldn’t get close enough to overtake, and that summed up the season as a whole,’ he says, sounding unbothered.

‘I’m a little bit superstitious. This was our 13th car. In 2017 we got 13 podiums with it, and 13 DNFs [did not finish]. We’ll be quite happy to get on to 14, to be honest.’

Somehow not at all exhausted (maybe it’s all the Red Bull), Horner is alert, and heavy on eye contact. He speaks slowly, in soft, reassuring tones. It’s probably the voice you’d want to hear radioing you to say your brakes have failed just as you approach a blind turn at 170mph. Maybe he’s practised it.

He is slightly shorter than average height, stockily built and well-dressed (a fitted jacket, white shirt and sand-coloured cardigan). Below crinkly eyes is light stubble, and above them the kind of soft, swept-back hair that is only ever found on very wealthy men.A signet ring glints on the  little finger of his left hand. In all, he looks like  a squashed Ralph Fiennes or a filled-out Lionel Messi, depending on your cultural touchstones.

Horner is in charge of just about everything to do with Red Bull Racing, from signing off on strategy before a Grand Prix to OK-ing the Christmas-party budget. When we tour the place later, he knows everyone’s name, what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. They seem to like him.

‘This job is not at all like a coach or a manager in football or rugby. Operating a race team is just one element you have to perform, so you have to have good people around you,’ he says. ‘Really, Formula One is the biggest team sport in the world. We have to get almost 800 people here on the same page [because] out of that comes competitive race cars. A lot of my function is removing obstacles. When I’m here in the office it’s like a doctor’s waiting room, but at the race track everyone’s role is defined. We operate a military chain of command during a Grand Prix.’

Horner attends every race in the calendar, plus test days and endless other commitments, meaning he is abroad for more than half of all the weekends in the year. It was easy enough when he was 30, but he now has three children at home.

‘You spend a lot of time on aeroplanes, so the most important thing is to be present when you have family time and to make the most of it. My wife will come to four or five races a year, and the children might join her, but she’s busy with her work too, you know?’

 With his wife, Geri, at the Italian Grand Prix 
in Monza, September 2017
With his wife, Geri, at the Italian Grand Prix in Monza, September 2017 Credit: Getty images 

He and Geri struck the world as one of the less likely celebrity pairings when they began dating in 2014, but they’d known one another for years. ‘We met at a Grand Prix, oddly enough, back in 2010. We were both with different partners at the time, though.’

The tabloids had a terrific time when they went public. Horner had only recently become a father for the first time with his former partner, while Halliwell’s love life had been gossip-column fodder since the 1990s.

‘You marry one of the most famous women in the UK and suddenly go from the back of the papers to the tabloid media. It wasn’t the most pleasant of experiences, but you’ve got to live your life how you want to live it,’ he says. ‘Geri’s been under the spotlight for 25 years, so it’s water off a duck’s back for her.’

In January, he and Geri had a son, Monty, and as well as looking after Olivia, his own four-year-old, Horner has become a stepfather to Bluebell, Geri’s 11-year-old daughter from a previous relationship. They all live together in ‘total chaos’, with ‘two Airedales, two West Highland terriers, a bunch of chickens, donkeys, you name it…’ Family will take over in the off-season.

Geri ‘loves Christmas and goes way over the top with decorations’, he says, and they’ll go en masse to Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park next weekend. Olivia is soon to star as Mary in her nativity play. ‘It’s fun, most of all, and you have to have these weeks off for family, because Formula One is a very false world. You need to recharge.’

Horner didn’t always want to have this much responsibility. From his 12th birthday, when the home-made go-kart was replaced by a real, second-hand one, the dream was to be a driver. His businessman father, Garry, was already a motor-racing enthusiast and happy to take his son to tracks all over the country.

Once he turned 18, the hobby became a semi-profession. Horner was a pretty good driver. He won a scholarship with Formula Renault, beat talents from across Europe, and tested an F1 car for Lotus. At 25, though, he realised the next level was one he’d be unlikely to reach, and parked up for good.

‘You have to be honest with yourself. I was racing in the championship below F1, Formula 3000, but there were guys like [future F1 drivers] Juan Pablo Montoya and Nick Heidfeld around, and  I realised I didn’t have their ability.’

A year earlier, with his father, Horner had set up a team, Arden International (Garry still runs it) in Formula 3000 – a now defunct racing division in which cars were limited at 3,000cc – and moved into management, shunning the chance to get a degree and preferring ‘the university of life’.

adrian newey
Adrian Newey, Red Bull's Chief Technical Officer Credit: Reuters

A year or two in, the Horners’ Arden team was winning a lot. And soon, other managers in the championship nominated Christian to become their spokesman. That meant dealing directly with the division’s owner, one Bernie Ecclestone.

‘From early on I was pushing Bernie for prize funds, say, to try and make it a more attractive formula. I was tenacious. I think he could see my drive and ambition, and one day he said, “Why don’t you get into Formula One?”’ At the time, Horner was just 30 – younger than half the drivers in the sport, including David Coulthard, who would go on to be his employee at Red Bull the next year.

Ecclestone, who controlled Formula One from the late 1970s until last year, suggested various options, before Horner met with Dietrich Mateschitz, the Austrian billionaire co-founder of the Red Bull energy-drinks company. Mateschitz had bought the remains of Jaguar’s ill-fated F1 team, including its Milton Keynes factory, and asked Horner to come and run it.

‘The first day I arrived here, there’d been a revolving door of management. I was announced as team principal at lunchtime, with all the staff assembled, and they probably thought, “Who is this kid?” But slowly you win hearts and minds.’

Wisely, Horner seemed to spend much of Red Bull’s first season recruiting. Dozens of the brightest engineers and analysts in the sport made their home in his garage over the next year or two, and they included the brightest of the lot, McLaren’s chief designer, Adrian Newey, who signed a contract worth a reported £7 million a year.

Between 2010 and 2013, the combination of Horner, Newey, talented drivers and bottomless pits of caffeine-soaked cash produced such dominance that complaints were lodged about the sport being boring and predictable (in that time, Vettel and his teammate, Mark Webber, won more races than all of their rivals combined).

Four years later, though, Red Bull’s monopoly has slipped as Mercedes – mainly due to Lewis Hamilton, who has won three of the last four drivers’ titles – has come to dominate instead. ‘Lewis is a Marmite type of character. He has a huge amount of support but he isn’t everybody’s cup of tea,’ says Horner. ‘He’s a fantastic driver, and I think sometimes he doesn’t even know why he’s quick. He’s undoubtedly the biggest name in F1, though, and he’s brought more interest from areas of society that maybe wouldn’t be interested otherwise.’

It’s a typically measured, political response. Horner is one of the more experienced figures on the grid these days, and knows it. There’s also no Ecclestone, which must be bizarre. ‘It’s very different now. Bernie became a friend to me, not just somebody that ran the business. You know, I learnt a lot from him. He built Formula One into what it is and we remain friends.’

Hamilton is staying with Mercedes for the moment but in Max Verstappen, a prodigiously talented 20-year-old driver, Horner believes he is raising the next superstar. ‘He’s the first driver I’ve had that I could legally be his father, but just like you wouldn’t believe Bernie was an 85-year-old running around here, Max doesn’t seem 20. He could be one of the greats, for sure.’

max verstappen
Horner's talented driver pairing, Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo  Credit: EPA

As for Horner, having spent 12 years in F1, it doesn’t feel glamorous to him any more, even if the glamour brings luxury brands in its wake. He has a penchant for the watches made by Red Bull’s engine-naming partner, TAG Heuer, the Swiss brand that has been associated with racing for decades.

‘Our drivers used to wear Casio watches and drive Nissans; now they wear TAG watches and drive Aston Martins. It’s part of the evolution of the team,’ he says.  If Horner stays in the spoith more watches than he knows what to do with.

‘I wouldn’t want to be doing this at that age. There’s more to life than F1, I think, but who knows what the future holds.’ For the moment, at least, Horner is staying put, and is happy about the new owners’ pledge to make the sport more entertaining.

‘We’re at a crossroads now: total technology, or just man and machine tested to the limit. It seems they’re inclined to go down the latter route,’ he says, before turning into that 11-year-old again. ‘I hope so, anyway. Formula One should be about wheel-to-wheel racing, with the drivers as heroes and gladiators again. It’s very exciting.’

TAG Heuer is the Official Timekeeper, Official Watch and Team Performance Partner of Red Bull Racing​

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