F1 2024: Christian Horner
Hero, villain, winner
Christian Horner’s Red Bull team – including the world’s greatest F1 car designer and a driver at the top of his game – wiped the floor with all their opponents in 2023. How the hell will they follow that?
Christian Horner’s Red Bull Racing team is on top of the world. It obliterated long-standing Formula 1 records last year by winning 21 of 22 grands prix. Max Verstappen buried the opposition, and expectations are it will also dominate this new season. Horner – who took the helm in 2005 when Red Bull acquired the failing Jaguar team from Ford, who no longer wanted any part of it – is arguably the smartest man in F1. He’s deftly drawn together the myriad elements that make up a top-level 21st-century racing team.
Horner has masterminded a combined total of 13 drivers’ and constructors’ titles, with Red Bull in the midst of its second spell of F1 dominance. Last season was a potential banana skin given the extra restrictions it faced on aerodynamic development testing as one of the consequences for breaking F1’s cost cap in 2021. But there were no slip-ups. Will 2024 be more of the same?
‘There are no guarantees,’ says Horner of Red Bull’s success in juggling the demands of developing last season’s car while making gains for 2024. ‘Stable regulations present two opportunities; one is evolution, but two is convergence. If you look at Formula 1 history, when there have been stable regulations, the field ultimately always converges. Where we are, you’re getting into the law of diminishing returns; you’re getting near the top of the [development] curve. We’ll never repeat a season like 2023, probably not in my lifetime anyway. But there’s still an awful lot of lessons that we drew from it and nothing stands still. You could see at different stages in the year that there was convergence.’
F1’s ground-effect regulations, introduced in 2022, allowed Red Bull to excel. The interaction of the powerful downforce-generating venturi-tunnel floors and the mechanical platform is crucial because the closer you run the cars to the ground, the more grip you have but the greater the chance of aerodynamic porpoising – the cyclical bouncing that rattles drivers’ backs and ultimately damages lap times. Red Bull mastered this quicker than the rest at the start of 2022, meaning its main weapon in defending against the law of convergence is being able to develop along the same pathway it has travelled for two years while others must make bigger changes. That suits Horner’s philosophy of keeping things simple to avoid the pitfalls inherent in F1 teams becoming mini industrial complexes.
‘I love racing and I’m as much a fan of the sport as when I was growing up,’ he says. ‘I’ve applied the principles that have served me well throughout my care
