Concern etched on the faces of Red Bull Racing engineers huddled around the first firing up of the new engine this week, with their team principal of 20 years escorted off the property and taken away to a “secret location”.
A belittled and tarnished Christian Horner, bruised by internet gossip and rumours of sexual misconduct, sits in a dowdy lawyer’s office. He would be cross examined for 8 hours by a team of corporate lawyers from Austria. This isn’t the kind of start to 2024 the World Championship winning team envisioned.
Under Dietrich Mateschitz, Red Bull GmbH in Austria were the rock upon which the team were founded, Prior to losing his life to cancer, Dietrich was a friend, confidant, and the protective guardian of the team.
How did we go from this, as well as 6 constructors world championships, to vague incriminating statements from the corporate HQ of Red Bull Gmbh?
Firstly, Horner is presumed innocent. It is my judgement to presume something else – that of a corporate plot.
There’s one man whose finger prints are all over this, in my opinion – and that is Oliver Mintzlaff, ex-Bundesliga manager of RB Leipzig who came into overall control of Red Bull’s sporting and corporate projects following the death of Mateschitz in 2022. I think his plan is to wrestle control of the glittering jewel in the Red Bull sporting crown, the F1 world champions, taking it out of the hands of the British motorsport world, handing outright control to the corporate suits and investors at the Red Bull Gmbh drinks company.
For the root of the fallout with Horner, I suggest to look no further to the disastrous ‘rebranding’ of the junior team Scuderia AlphaTauri. This midfield team, full of serious motorsport people has been flogged like a golden goose, or indeed like a CashApp to entice sponsors and corporate VIPs – over a decade of identity flushed down to the toilet. Far from their traditional HQ in Faenza, Italy, the launch was a private only affair in Vegas, with no live stream and no invitation to F1 journalists. A cocktail party for American VIPs.
The new team name has an important finger print on it, that of “RB” as previously seen at a certain German football club. There’s some cock and bull story about Racing Bulls, being a nod to Mateschitz’s Flying Bulls. No, this has Mintzlaff’s corporate identity “RB” from the Bundesliga written all over it.
The new official name is VISA CashApp RB. The achievement so far – to wipe the popular existing identity, alienate fans and give the prestigious sport of Formula One the worst team name in its entire history.
Surely Christian Horner will not have been happy with it, but the larger issue for the main team I think is the bombshell news that VISA CashApp RB would be moving in with them.
Yes, a second team moving to Milton Keynes, to occupy valuable space right alongside the main team. A move that threatens to be a huge distraction for the world champions, as well as drawing the ire of rival team principals such as McLaren boss Zak Brown about the unfair advantage of having two teams under the same ownership. Now not only common ownership but common factory space as well, and perhaps soon the same manager – Mr “RB” himself, Oliver Mintzlaff, with Horner’s good name dispatched to the same bin as the one now occupied by Torro Rosso and AlphaTauri.
To add to this, Adrian Newey is rumoured to be off to Ferrari, taking with him chief technical director Pierre Waché. The core of the team all now gone – Horner, Newey, Waché, and potentially corporate management incoming – the death knell of any nimble F1 operation.
So it looks like we now have the makings of an end.
Which might come as a relief to some F1 fans, who want to see a more unpredictable grid in the coming years!
If this is indeed “Der plan” with Herr Mintzlaff, it is just a shame that Mateschitz’s greatest achievement in the world of sports should potentially be undermined so badly by the people he trusted to take his place.
Given their ongoing success (not just success but outright domination) there’s zero logical reason to change the team management (barring actual serious misconduct, unlikely and not yet proven) other than for reasons of sheer greed and the way in which new management always has to be seen to be proving itself to the usual hordes of hungry corporate shareholders.
To say the least, the launch of RB20 on 15th February 2024 will be interesting.
