Christian Horner F1 rival crucial to landing him team boss role

Christian Horner

Christian Horner F1 rival crucial to landing him team boss role

Red Bull now have Laurent Mekies as their team principal

Sam Cook Digital Journalist

Sports Journalist who has been covering motorsport since 2023

Friday 31 July 2026 20:48

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A Red Bull F1 insider has revealed that one of Christian Horner's rivals landed him the team boss job at Red Bull in the first place.

Horner was CEO and team principal at the Milton Keynes-based outfit between 2005-2025, being axed last July after 20 years in the job following a difficult start to the year for the team.

Red Bull instead replaced him with Laurent Mekies, and Horner was just one of a number of Red Bull figures who have left the team in recent years.

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Adrian Newey and Jonathan Wheatley joined rival teams, while Max Verstappen's race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase is set to join McLaren from the 2028 season, and Horner's former colleague Helmut Marko retired at the end of 2025.

Horner and Marko did not see eye-to-eye during their last few years working together, as revealed in detail by Marko in an explosive interview given after his retirement from the team.

Marko was not happy with what he felt like were attempts by Horner to take over the team following the death of Red Bull co-founder Dietrich Mateschitz back in 2022.

Now, however, a Red Bull insider has revealed that it was advisor Marko who had initially backed Horner to be team boss, when the Brit was in his 30s.

Marko helped hire Horner

Matt Majendie is an F1 journalist who spent a lot of time with the Red Bull team, with his experiences now being documented in a book titled Inside Red Bull Racing: A season with F1's most thrilling team.

"The thing that sometimes gets overlooked on Helmut, as well as being part of team Verstappen and he's very close to him, he's so enormous in what happened with this team," Majendie told the Road To Success podcast. "His best friend was Dietrich Mateschitz, who owned Red Bull and sadly passed away a few years ago, and it was him that persuaded Mateschitz, to buy the Jaguar team in the first place.

"It was him that pushed for factory rebuilds. Amazingly, it was him that that pushed for Horner to become the team boss in his early 30s, when that was a bit of an eye raising appointment. And then on top of that, he was the guy in charge of the academy so he's been very integral in that.

"But he is quite a scary uncle, I guess. If we're calling him an uncle figure he's definitely got this sort of steely look to him. He would be a good Bond villain. But actually, again, his personality is not like that. He's got a very-I mean, maybe he can be pretty hard, and the way he's cut certain drivers and dealt with certain drivers. But he's got a really funny sense of humour as well. There's always a little chuckle and a sly comment here and there.

"The reason when things unravelled was Mateschitz passed away, and that left a bit of a power vacuum and a struggle. And we saw how that played out, and and it's now settled with obviously people having left etc. Which is a shame that it ended in certain acrimony for some of them because they did such brilliant things together.

"They may have tried to manage him, but he was the least PR managed person that I've ever encountered I think in sport. He would just talk openly. He'd say something in a TV interview quite openly. For me personally, I find that hugely refreshing as a journalist for someone to sort of be honest and speak their mind."

Despite their differences towards the end, Horner and Marko did collaborate well together, claiming 14 world championships across 20 years as colleagues.

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Written by

Sam Cook - Digital Journalist

Sam Cook is a talented young sports journalist and social media professional who now specialises in Formula 1, having previously worked as a football journalist and a local news reporter for a variety of different brands.

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F1 Red Bull Christian Horner Helmut Marko