Horner’s pay bump lands just before the exit as Mercedes wrestles with being everyone’s favourite engine – your Tuesday F1 brief
The spreadsheets are talking again. Fresh company filings have laid out Red Bull Racing’s 2024 balance sheet, and tucked inside is a familiar headline name: Christian Horner. The now-former team principal received a pay rise ahead of his departure earlier this year, while the team posted £314m in revenue and a slender post-tax profit of £1.681m. It’s the kind of corporate footnote that tends to arrive with a thud in the paddock: big turnover, tight margins, and a reminder that even in a cost-cap world, the numbers still tell their own story.
Horner’s exit has been the dominant off-track thread of 2025, and the timing on those remuneration details won’t do anything to quiet the chatter. Red Bull’s financials, meanwhile, reflect a modern F1 outfit that’s both a sporting operation and a polished commercial machine. The profit line is small compared to the headline revenue, but that’s increasingly the profile for top teams under the current regulations.
On track, Baku served up another case study in the odd tension at the heart of Mercedes’ business model. Toto Wolff knows exactly how valuable it is to have multiple cars showcasing the power unit, and he got the full brochure in Azerbaijan: George Russell delivered P2 for the works team and Williams’ Carlos Sainz hustled his way to the podium as well. McLaren, also running Mercedes hardware, continues to live at the sharp end. As an advert for the three-pointed star, it doesn’t get much better.
And yet, there’s the other side of it. With the 2026 rules bearing down, Wolff admits he’s of two minds about customers turning into weekly headaches. It’s a glamorous problem – sell engines, win headlines – but there’s nothing glamorous about getting beaten by your own kit. The calculation becomes even trickier if the competitive order condenses with the next power unit cycle.
There was a small but notable upturn at Red Bull on Sunday from Yuki Tsunoda, who strung together his best result of the season around the castle walls. The step wasn’t magic; it sounded like a hard-earned unlock of an RB21 that’s been prickly more often than not. Tsunoda said the work has started to click, and it looked it. He’s been open about wanting a future at the senior team, and drives like Baku will do him no harm when decisions start getting made for 2026.
Lewis Hamilton, meanwhile, didn’t sugarcoat Ferrari’s outlook after another laboured weekend. The seven-time champion sees the Scuderia increasingly focused on the reset to 2026, and that makes outsprinting the likes of McLaren and Red Bull – both still dropping meaningful updates – a tall order over the run-in. It’s pragmatic, if not particularly romantic: Ferrari will still swing on Sundays, but the bulk of the heavy lifting appears parked for the new rules.
A few quick takes to close the book on Baku:
– Mercedes look cohesive again, and not just because Russell cashed in. The car balance is on a much friendlier page than it was early in the year.
– Williams’ execution with Sainz was sharp, and there’s a sturdiness to that project that’s been missing for a while.
– McLaren continue to operate like a team that expects to decide titles, not chase them. However the math shakes out, that mindset is obvious.
– Red Bull’s ceiling remains high, but the story of their season is about consistency. When the window narrows, it narrows fast.
As for the boardroom bulletin that kicked this off, it’s a reminder that F1’s current era is defined as much by governance and business as by lap time. The numbers keep everyone honest. And every so often, they drop just enough intrigue to keep the paddock buzzing between races.
