More than a year after his abrupt exit from the Red Bull Racing pitwall in July 2025, former team principal Christian Horner is finally shedding light on the circumstances surrounding his dismissal, as Motorsport.com reports. In an interview with The Guardian, the 52-year-old executive placed the blame for his departure squarely on a massive corporate power shift following the passing of Red Bull billionaire founder Dietrich Mateschitz in late 2022.
Despite guiding Red Bull through two separate eras of intense Formula 1 dominance with Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen, collecting six constructors' championships and eight drivers' titles, Horner claims the new Austrian leadership group ousted him without providing a concrete justification. When pressed on why his 20-year tenure was terminated, Horner noted there was a feeling of too much control in his hands, though he was not really given a reason. He explicitly denied rumours that internal friction with Max Verstappen or his outspoken father, Jos, directly led to his firing, clarifying that it was purely a Red Bull decision.
The timing of the dismissal was extraordinarily traumatic. Just days before Red Bull executives showed him the door, Horner's former partner and the mother of his daughter Olivia, Beverley Allen, passed away following a battle with eye cancer. Given his personal grieving process and the foundational work he poured into establishing the Red Bull Powertrains division, Horner admitted the clinical nature of his firing was incredibly difficult to digest, describing it as painful and brutal.
Taking aim at the current Red Bull regime spearheaded by Oliver Mintzlaff and his paddock replacement, Laurent Mekies, Horner suggested that loyalty and grace are rapidly vanishing from the modern Formula 1 landscape. Pointing out that the team had pole position at the previous race, he stated that history repeats itself and that a lot of teams haven't delivered over the years without seeing the same brutality as when he left.
While acknowledging the severe emotional toll of losing the team he built from a 400-person startup into a 2,200-person juggernaut, Horner insisted he has eventually found a sense of peace outside the paddock. He confirmed a re-established reasonable relationship with Mintzlaff, who recently called to thank him for laying the groundwork for the team's first fully independent engine victory in Bahrain, while noting that nothing was more important at the time than supporting his 11-year-old child through a hideous period.
