Martin Brundle isn’t buying the idea that Christian Horner is about to stroll into Aston Martin and pick up the team principal job, even with the paddock’s favourite rumour mill spinning harder than usual after the Red Bull boss’ exit.
Speaking on Sky’s *The F1 Show* podcast, Brundle’s take was less about whether Horner would *fit* at Aston Martin and more about whether the deal structure would ever suit him. In Brundle’s view, Horner’s next move—if there is one in the short term—won’t be a straight salary-and-title arrangement. It’ll be about ownership.
“I doubt it, because he wants a slice of a team that he goes to,” Brundle said when asked directly about Horner potentially leading Aston Martin.
That’s the key point here. Aston Martin can offer prestige, facilities and now a very Newey-shaped technical ceiling, but Horner has long been associated with the kind of influence that comes from being entrenched in a project—politically as much as competitively. If he’s returning to the pitwall, the suggestion is he’ll want more than a badge on his shirt.
Could Lawrence Stroll make that happen? Brundle didn’t dismiss it outright, noting Stroll has already shown he’s willing to put equity on the table, as he did with Adrian Newey. But he also hinted Horner may prefer to wait for a cheaper, cleaner route into team ownership rather than diving into Aston’s already-crowded top floor.
“He might want to do that,” Brundle said of Stroll offering a stake. “I mean, Christian might be picking up some shares somewhere in one of the teams a bit more cheaply down the road, I don’t know. I think he’ll wait and get the right situation.”
That dovetails with another thread doing the rounds: Horner is understood to be among the interested parties in the 24 per cent stake in Alpine currently owned by Otro Capital. If Horner’s priority is equity—real leverage, not ceremonial—then Alpine’s partial stake reads like a far more straightforward play than navigating Aston Martin’s existing hierarchy and shareholder mix.
Aston’s leadership picture is messy in a different way. Newey has come in not just as managing technical partner but also as a shareholder and, crucially, as team principal—at least for now. And the word in the paddock is that Newey himself is already looking beyond his own tenure in that role, leading a search for a long-term successor.
One name has been repeatedly linked with that future: Jonathan Wheatley, formerly a senior Red Bull figure and, like Horner, someone with a long working history alongside Newey. Newey is understood to have identified Wheatley as a primary target. Whether Wheatley is gettable, and on what timeline, is another question—but it frames the Horner talk in a slightly different light. If Aston’s technical power centre is already plotting a succession plan, it doesn’t scream “we’re about to hand the keys to Horner”.
Brundle also made another point that’s been voiced more and more loudly since Newey’s move: the sport has a habit of misusing its specialists. Newey can do the team principal job if needed, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best deployment of perhaps the most valuable technical mind of the modern era—especially with 2026’s new rules and the inevitable early-season fire-fighting that comes with them.
“I don’t think putting Adrian in as team principal or anything like that is a good use of his talents,” Brundle said. “He’s not really a leader of people, I don’t think. I think he’s just a genius and should be focused on that, and somebody else needs to be doing the logistical stuff and the meetings and what have you.”
David Coulthard, another former Newey colleague, struck a similar note elsewhere, stressing that Newey has never presented as a front-facing team boss type across three decades in the sport. In Coulthard’s framing, team principals are, by definition, public operators: media-facing, politically fluent, and accountable across every department, not just the performance group. Newey, by contrast, is at his most potent when he’s living in the regulations and extracting lap time.
All of which matters because Aston Martin’s immediate reality is far less glamorous than the Horner speculation suggests. Four rounds into 2026 and they’re still chasing their first point of the season heading into Miami. That’s not a crisis in itself—seasons aren’t won in April, and 2026 is a reset year across the grid—but it does sharpen the internal priorities. When you’re trying to stop the bleeding early in a new regulations cycle, the last thing you want is uncertainty about who’s running the operation, who’s empowered to make calls, and how many hands are on the steering wheel.
So if you’re looking for the likely shape of this story, it’s probably not “Horner to Aston” so much as “Aston figuring out how to let Newey be Newey.” That could still mean a heavyweight executive comes in—Wheatley or someone of that profile—to carry the management load while the technical group gets on with digging the team out of its early-season hole.
As for Horner, Brundle’s read is that he can afford to be patient. And if there’s one currency Horner has always spent well in F1, it’s leverage.
