Wolff: “Horner felt entitled to have all the power at Red Bull”

The new Red Bull 2026 will be a special season for Red Bull, which will face the world championship with several innovations: for the first time after four consecutive years, Max Verstappen will take to the track without the world champion title, with the Dutchman having Isack Hadjar as his new teammate. The Milton Keynes company will also begin a technical partnership with Ford, all in the absence of Helmut Marko, who resigned after twenty years of staying in the team as a consultant. Added to this were other departures, in this case already realized in 2025: those of Adrian Newey and Christian Horner, the latter fired during the current championship and replaced by Laurent Mekies as Team Principal. Abu Dhabi 2021 A long period in Red Bull also ended for the Briton characterized by eight successes in the Drivers’ World Championship, one of which was won in 2021 by Max Verstappen, the first of the Dutchman’s career in F1. A victory that went down in history for what happened at the end of the race, with Lewis Hamilton losing the chance to obtain his eighth title in controversial circumstances due to the decision of the then Race Director Michael Masi in managing the restart after the Safety Car. An episode still remembered today by Mercedes Team Principal Toto Wolff in an interview with The Telegraph: “Both deserved to become champions, but the referee made a wrong decision, to use a football analogy, and there is no going back. The goal has been scored, the match is over.” Character Limited to what happened at Yas Marina on that occasion, Wolff expressed his opinion on Horner’s personality, and in particular whether the latter had ever admitted that what happened was wrong: “He has never been able to admit it – he specified – I try to look at it from the other side: from their point of view, they deserved to become world champions, they had had some unfair incidents against them during the season, and the result of that race is a faithful representation of the performance levels during the season season. But Christian has never been able to admit the same: if it had been the other way around and it had happened to them that day, it would have been catastrophic and he would have come up with all sorts of insults. I think the ability to be introspective or to see the other side with a little bit of compassion is a total gap in his personality, and that ultimately hurt him, because he felt entitled to all the power, and Red Bull didn’t want to give it to him.”