Christian Horner has finally put words to the blank space he’s occupied since Red Bull yanked him out of the pitwall last summer — and it’s less about anger than the hollowed-out feeling of being abruptly written out of a life he built.
Speaking in a Netflix interview filmed for the new season of *Drive to Survive*, Horner describes the moment Red Bull GmbH moved him aside in the middle of the 2025 campaign as something he didn’t even get the dignity of processing in public. After 20 years as the face and voice of the operation, he says he never got the chance to say goodbye to the people he’d led through every title fight, implosion and reinvention.
“I feel a real sense of loss and hurt. It was all rather sudden. I didn’t really get a chance to say a proper goodbye,” Horner says in the episode, visibly emotional as the segment cuts between his interview and candid conversations at home with his wife, Geri.
The timeline, as he recounts it, underlines why the whole thing still lands as a shock. Red Bull arrived at Silverstone off a bruising Austrian Grand Prix and then endured a miserable Sunday despite Max Verstappen’s pole position, finishing only fifth. Horner says that within a day of that weekend he was summoned to a meeting in London. There, he was told that “operationally” he was no longer involved in running the Formula 1 team — immediately.
For a man who lived on adrenaline and control, that wording matters. It wasn’t a transition. It wasn’t a handover. It was a switch flipped.
“Of course, your immediate reaction when you’ve delivered a shit sandwich like that is ‘F**k them’,” he adds. “I’ve had something taken away from me that wasn’t my choice, that was very precious to me.”
Red Bull never publicly offered a reason for removing Horner from his posts as team principal and CEO. Horner himself doesn’t pin it on a single event either. Instead, he frames it as the end point of a slow internal shift in power after the death of founder Dietrich Mateschitz — a vacuum that, in his telling, changed the way authority was tolerated within the group.
“Ultimately, things changed within the business, within the group, when the founder died,” Horner says. “After Dietrich’s death, I think probably I was deemed to have, maybe, too much control.”
He also swats away the most obvious external narrative — that Verstappen and his father, Jos, had forced the issue. Jos Verstappen had publicly called for Horner’s removal early in 2024 amid an internal investigation into allegations about Horner’s behaviour. Those tensions lingered in the background of Red Bull’s public life for months, feeding the idea that the team’s most valuable asset would eventually get what it wanted.
Horner insists that isn’t what happened.
“His father has never been my biggest fan. He’s been outspoken about me, but I don’t believe that the Verstappens were responsible in any way,” he says, placing the decision instead with Red Bull GmbH CEO Oliver Mintzlaff, and with Helmut Marko “advising from the sideline”.
That line will land loudly in a paddock that has long understood Red Bull as a two-centre power structure: Horner on one side, Marko on the other, with Verstappen’s orbit powerful enough to bend both when it really mattered. Horner doesn’t go as far as to say there was a coup — but he doesn’t disguise that the question of “overall control” was at the heart of it.
It’s also telling what Horner chooses to dwell on. There’s no grand defence of every decision, no long list of grievances aired. The rawest part is personal: the speed, the silence, the sense that the version of Red Bull he thought he belonged to no longer existed.
Outside the Netflix interview, Horner’s public life since his removal has been minimal, limited largely to an appearance at the European Motor Show in Dublin. But the business end of his exit has been anything but quiet. He was first removed from operational duties in early July 2025, then stripped of directorship roles across Red Bull’s F1-related companies in August, before a full severance package was agreed and confirmed on September 22.
That settlement is believed to be around $100 million, and crucially it appears to have shortened a “gardening leave” period that would otherwise have kept him inactive. The compromise is understood to leave Horner free to return to competition in the second half of the 2026 season if the right opportunity appears — an important detail in a year where the competitive order is being reshaped and experienced operators are gold dust.
In the Netflix segment, Horner also revisits the internal pressures that defined his last season at Red Bull, including the ongoing headache of the second car. Liam Lawson’s early-2025 struggles prompted a swift in-season switch to Yuki Tsunoda, but Horner says the decision wasn’t his and casts it as part of a wider push to prioritise the young driver programme — with Marko again a central force.
“It wasn’t my choice,” he says of swapping Lawson and Tsunoda. “I was always pushed to take drivers from the young driver programme. Helmut was a big driver in it.”
If there’s a moment of levity, it arrives via an unlikely source: Toto Wolff. Horner reads out the text exchange he had with his long-time Mercedes rival after the axe fell, and it’s exactly the kind of dark humour you’d expect from two men who made a decade of F1 feel like a heavyweight feud.
Wolff, Horner says, messaged: “I didn’t know what to say… because, on one side, you’ve been a real asshole, but, on the other hand, the sport will miss one of its main protagonists. Who should I fight and love to hate…?”
Horner’s reply is just as pointed — and, in its own way, more revealing than any corporate statement Red Bull ever issued.
“I’ve loved locking horns with you all these years,” he responds. “So thank you for the rivalry, the competition, the needle. No one else even came close… P.S., you need a haircut.”
It’s a neat encapsulation of where Horner seems to be landing: hurt, yes — but still himself. Still competitive. Still, at least in his own mind, not finished.
*Drive to Survive* Season 8 is released on Netflix on February 27.
