What Is Happening at Red Bull Racing?
In 2023, Red Bull Racing put in the most dominant season in the history of Formula 1, winning all but one of the 23 races on the global calendar. It shows no signs of having lost any performance in 2024 — and yet, the Milton Keynes-based racing team seems on the verge of imploding internally.
Related: F1 2024 season primer
Allegations of misconduct
In early February, Red Bull Racing team principal Christian Horner was accused of coercive behavior by a female employee. The charge was denied by Horner, and dismissed by the Red Bull organization. Then, as teams prepped for the year during pre-season testing in Bahrain, an anonymous source leaked dozens of screenshots to the entire paddock — screenshots of texts that suggested an inappropriate sexual relationship between Horner, husband to Ginger Spice, and his assistant.
Nearly three months on, we still know very little of the legitimacy of the texts and of the many rumors that have emerged since. Making sense of the tremendous amount of noise surrounding the affair is a futile endeavor without close personal access to key individuals, so it’s difficult to lend any substance to any the countless speculations.
Internal power struggle
But one thing is absolutely clear: there is significant discord within the Red Bull organization. Since the accusation of inappropriate behavior, there have been numerous allegations of a power struggle between the Thai and Austrian sides of the multinational conglomerate. Presumably, after two decades of leading Red Bull’s F1 racing team to great success, Horner wants a larger cut of the pie, and is encountering resistance.
This supposedly pits Horner against Dr. Helmut Marko, longtime team advisor and talent scout, though it’s anybody’s guess as to why the two figures — who appear to be friends from the outside — would be at odds with each other. To complicate matters, Marko is close to Max Verstappen, the reigning F1 champion whose contract is generally known to include an exit clause contingent upon Marko leaving. Meanwhile, Max’s father Jos has been stoking fires in the Red Bull camp, and it’s not clear if Max is at all involved.
More recently, it has also been reported that chief car designer Adrian Newey, after nearly two decades with Red Bull, would leave for another team. This rumor is actually well supported and may soon be confirmed to be true. Newey is the most successful F1 car designer in history and has played an important role in all of Red Bull Racing’s championship victories.
Dichotomy of success
What makes this sudden outpouring of drama bizarre is that, from the outside, Red Bull Racing appears to be an extremely well-oiled sporting organization. Even when it didn’t have a car to match Mercedes some years ago, it was on top of everything else. And since the new 2022 regulations, it has been utterly exceptional. Just at the last F1 grand prix in Japan, the team put in a pit stop masterclass with four stops averaging 2.0 seconds flat. Verstappen won the race with a comfortable margin, almost assuredly on his way to a fourth straight title.
Horner, Marko, Newey, and Verstappen are all at the top of their game, enjoying unrivaled success, and each having established a legacy that many in the sport would envy. Running an F1 team is not easy. It’s a staggering task that relies on the precise and harmonious cooperation of many different parts. So it’s difficult to imagine that behind all of the on-track success, Red Bull’s key figures may be involved in nasty business drama that is anything but harmonious.
But it takes just one domino for all the rest to fall — and while Red Bull is still winning for the moment, there’s only one direction the team can go from its current place at top. It might just not happen the way it usually does.
Kurt Verlin was born in France and lives in the United States. Throughout his life he was always told French was the language of romance, but it was English he fell in love with. He likes cats, music, cars, 30 Rock, Formula 1, and pretending to be a race car driver in simulators; but most of all, he just likes to write about it all. See more articles by Kurt.