Red Bull have made the tough decision to sack Christian Horner immediately during the 2025 Formula 1 season, ending a 20-year spell at the reigns of the team by the 51-year-old. But were they right to do so?
During his time at Milton Keynes, the British motorsport executive transformed the previously named Jaguar team from F1 hopefuls to championship contenders, taking their first wins in the 2009 campaign before clean sweeping the titles from 2010-13.
They then suffered a setback at the start of the turbo-hybrid era as the Mercedes power unit proved competitive and Renault did not have an answer, prompting their four-time champion, Sebastian Vettel, to leave to go to Ferrari.
However, showing his traditional grit, Horner and his team kept plugging away, sporadically taking wins between 2014-2020, until finding their breakthrough with the Honda power unit.
After technical regulation changes pulled Mercedes back within reach in 2021, the team managed to controversially snatch the drivers’ title away from Lewis Hamilton at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix as Max Verstappen became champion for the first time.
They then hit the ground running in the ground effect era, quickly dismissing a Ferrari challenge to begin a run of dominance that would see the claim 42 wins from 47 races before finally being caught by McLaren.
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And that is where the troubles begin: since Zak Brown’s team closed the gap, they have continued to go from strength-to-strength whilst Red Bull have simply wilted in the face of that challenge – despite Verstappen pipping Lando Norris to the drivers’ title.
Considering the 2024 Bahrain GP saw Norris finish 48.5 seconds behind the Dutchman, it was unthinkable at the time that the gap would have swung around to a 16-second deficit by the 2025 Chinese GP, the first dry race of the season.
Since then, the Austrian outfit have only seemed to continue to slum backwards whilst McLaren only seem to get faster and faster, with Verstappen well out-of-contention in the drivers’ championship as he now finds himself 69 points away from Oscar Piastri.
The team themselves are fourth in the constructors’ standings and are comfortably behind Mercedes and Ferrari whilst also languishing 288 points away. This time last year, they held a 69-point advantage over second place.
So, one question that remains is were Red Bull right to sack Christian Horner in the 2025 Formula 1 season?
Were Red Bull right to sack Christian Horner?
On the one hand, Horner has been in charge of what has generally been a very steady ship aside from the past 18 months and that’s something rare to find across a two-decade stint in the sport.
For example, during his tenure, Ferrari have moved through six bosses during that time. Alpine have gone through nine of them. That highlights just how volatile the world of F1 actually is and how often heads can roll.
However, the decline of the past 18 months has been, to put it mildly, unacceptable. Key personnel such as Adrian Newey have headed straight for the door amid a turbulent environment within Red Bull whilst Jonathan Wheatley has also gone too.
The next name could even be Verstappen, which is simply unacceptable to shareholders of the energy drinks brand; who will no doubt view him as a key marketing asset before even getting to his supreme driving talent.
That talent has papered over the cracks since the 2023 Spanish GP as per Sergio Perez’s complaints with the Red Bull philosophy towards their car and his freakish ability to drive just about anything remains unmatched.
Almost of the team’s success can be attributed to his skills since the beginning of 2024 with his three teammates in that time (Perez, Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda) combining for just four podiums and 162pts.
For context, Verstappen is already on two wins, 165 points and five podiums in the first half of 2025 alone. With that in mind, Red Bull have effectively been a one-man team and if he leaves?
Tsunoda’s results show them as little more than backmarkers, with him finishing no better than 12th since May 18. That’s the plain reality of what happens if their star four-time champion leaves and isn’t replaced by someone of a similar calibre.
Keeping Verstappen is absolutely imperative to Red Bull’s marketing presence as well as retaining some semblance of competitiveness for the rest of the 2025 season at least, before they launch into the new 2026 regulations.
In light of that, it’s hard to say that Horner didn’t deserve to be sacked by Red Bull if it keeps Verstappen around; and if he’s already leaving to go to Mercedes then it is a sackable offence anyway.
