by Christian Horner is the chief executive of Red Bull who enjoyed an all-powerful era in Formula One and made his drivers famous.
Brimming with confidence, Horner was just 31 years old when he took the reins on the team’s debut on the F1 grid in 2005. Since then, he has won seven drivers’ championships and six constructors’ championships. However, it is the fly-on-the-wall era of making sports documentaries and his previous marriage to Spice Girl that has made Horner a household name as instantly recognizable as even his top driver Max Verstappen.
Horner’s fierce rivalry with Mercedes’ Toto Wolff was filmed in the Netflix series Drive to Survive, with cameras following their every move, to give them an unlikely profile that now surpasses F1.
Exchanges between the two were seen at the box office in 2021 when Verstappen took the championship win from Lewis Hamilton in Abu Dhabi. For many years now, Horner has been known in his role as a villain for Hamilton fans. “Mercedes f—– up,” he said on Sky’s League Of Their Own in December. “They left poor Lewis out there on tires that had been done for most of the race and we were dealing with Max, so he was on a fresh set of tyres.”
A year ago, in a wide-ranging interview with Telegraph Sport, Horner joked that, after that race, “to the average Lewis fan I’m probably some anti-Christ”.
“But I make no apologies for standing up for my team,” he said. “I’m protective of them and I wear my heart on my sleeve. I know we did not cheat last year. I’m 100 percent comfortable with that.”
When Horner is not racing, he is commuting to the Red Bull factory in Milton Keynes where he will be chief executive of Red Bull Racing, Red Bull Powertrains and Red Bull Advanced Technologies. In total he is responsible for around 1,500 employees.
“I think people also forget that Red Bull Racing is also an incredible success story for this country,” he previously told Telegraph Sport. “Of course we belong to Austria and we are proud of that. But we have a British team with a British team principal and 85 per cent of our workforce has to be British.”
Horner has become the iconic face of the sport’s modern era, having not missed a single grand prix, even through illness, since 2005. Turning 50 in November, Verstappen presented him with one of his race-winning helmets.
However, Horner is often painted as the bad guy by F1 fans in this country. Apart from the controversial manner of Verstappen’s title win in 2021, a budget cap did not help, with Red Bull found to have overspent and fined $7 million and restrictions on aerodynamic testing.
But his wife Geri Horner firmly rejects the view that Horner is too happy with himself [née Halliwell]the former pop singer and now children’s book author.
“What I know about my husband is that he is a good person, he is an honest person, and he is very interested in his team and the sport,” she said last year. “He’s really a very simple man. He’s a racer through and through.”
The Horners’ high-profile relationship has come under a lot of scrutiny, with reports that Horner’s parents were initially unhappy about the way things ended with his ex-partner, Beverley, soon after the birth of their daughter Olivia. Horner argues that they are now behind them.
Horner married Halliwell in Bedfordshire in 2015 and insisted last year that the relationship between his ex-wife Geri and their children is now “completely harmonious”.
Away from F1, the Horners have developed a passion for horse racing, having built new stables for 14 horses at their Oxfordshire home, including two foal stalls. They also took on full-time trainer, former jockey Maxine Filby, to run their yard for them.
Horner, himself a former Formula 3000 driver, joined the team of Red Bull, the Austrian energy drink manufacturer, as it entered F1 under the leadership of founder Dietrich Mateschitz, who died in October 2022.
Horner’s long-term plan for Red Bull and immediate success helped land superstar drivers and young prospects including Verstappen. After receiving an OBE in 2013, he was appointed CBE in the New Year’s Honors list last year after Red Bull won all but one of the grands prix in the 2023 season.
Horner is now the sport’s longest-serving team principal but remains one of its youngest as F1 prepares for another major test of its powers. A new car for this season will be revealed in the coming weeks, but the 2026 season, which will see more electric power as well as 100 per cent sustainable fuels, will be the big unknown for Horner and his team-mates.
