Horner dismisses “wild rumours” of Red Bull departure

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In the round-up: Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has categorically denied claims his position in charge of the team is under threat.

In brief

Horner has long-term commitment to Red Bull, regardless of Porsche

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Reports in Dutch media yesterday claimed Horner was concerned he could be replaced as team principal if their deal with Porsche goes ahead. He emphatically rejected the claims after yesterday’s race.

“There’s always wild rumours in this paddock. I recently made a commitment to this team for the long-term and indeed any discussions that we’ve had have been contingent upon the management structure being the same, which has always been fully accepted. So I don’t really need to comment on wild speculation,” Horner affirmed after the Dutch Grand Prix.

Zhou pit lane speeding incident “just a bit unlucky”

Alfa Romeo head of trackside engineering Xevi Pujolar said that the pit lane speeding incident which earned Zhou Guanyu a five-second penalty during the Dutch Grand Prix was caused by anti-stall.

“It just was a bit unlucky on Zhou’s side,” explained Pujolar. “He was just braking into the pit lane and applying the pit limiter, he locked the rears and then it triggered the anti-stall, it just slowed down too much. When he recovered he just overshot slightly the speed and got caught over-speeding.”

Stewards “don’t like” F2 collision, but no penalty

Richard Verschoor claimed second place in the Formula 2 feature race at Zandvoort after colliding with Jack Doohan following a late-race Safety Car restart. Doohan’s race was ended by the clash but Verschoor was not penalised for the collision.

Speaking after the race Verschoor apologised to his rival. “It was definitely not my intention to hit him,” he said. “I thought everybody was going and then we all slowed I locked all my wheels but I couldn’t avoid it. It’s not the way I want to finish second.”

“Because the last corner is banked I couldn’t see the cars in front,” the Charouz driver explained. “Then the two cars in front of me start accelerating and suddenly they braked and I was just too close. I thought I had a good restart, but then everybody braked again so I just hit him.”

The stewards indicated they were dissatisfied the collision occured, but said in their statement they could not find an offence to penalise. “Having considered the matter extensively, the stewards determined that car five [Lawson] accelerated very late just before the Safety Car line. Additional the driver of car five was weaving prior to his restart.

“Further back in the field of cars there was a collision between car 20 [Verschoor] and car three [Doohan]. Car 20 was not able to brake and ran into the back of car three who subsequently retired.

“The stewards don’t like to see restarts conducted in this way but finally couldn’t find any breach of the Sporting Regulations, hence the decision of ‘No Further Action’. The driver of car three stated after the announcement of the decision that he concurred that it was a racing incident.”

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Comment of the day

After a one-stop, risky strategy failed to pay off at the Dutch Grand Prix, Edvaldo argues that despite its technical dominance of the turbo-hybrid era, Mercedes’ strategy remains a weakness.

Mercedes can design the best cars possible, but they’re never going to dominate it like Red Bull does because their strategist was never that good. I remember Singapore 2019 which was completely in the bag but they left him out running longer when it was clear the undercut was very powerful for God knows why. So he came back in fourth and was stuck. Couldn’t get even third.

To be good strategists during a whole season with great cars and drivers is very easy, you can always bounce back at the next race. Now they don’t have the great car anymore, the good opportunities are few and far between and their strategies are as unremarkable as ever.
Edvaldo

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday to Maciek, Us_Peter and Dominikwilde!

On this day in motorsport

  • 35 years ago today Williams locked out the front row of the grid for the Italian Grand Prix, Nelson Piquet in his active suspension-equipped FW11B ahead of Nigel Mansell in the passive car

Author information

Hazel Southwell
Hazel is a motorsport and automotive journalist with a particular interest in hybrid systems, electrification, batteries and new fuel technologies....

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15 comments on “Horner dismisses “wild rumours” of Red Bull departure”

  1. Profile Photo

    ruliemaulana (@ruliemaulana)
    5th September 2022, 4:03

    The most important thing is what lead to that strategies.

    Toto leadership is farce. He makes it obvious to his team members that Lewis is the youngest adorable child that need to be protected. He willingly shown he hates when other child won.

    In the end, being too protective is just about the same as didn’t trust his favorite child to fight on his own

  2. Sumedh
    5th September 2022, 4:21

    Lot of different reports flying around on the Red Bull Porsche link up. One saying Honda still interested, another with Porsche seeking control, and now Horner refuting reports of his removal.

    Would be good to get an article from Deiter on this.

    1. jff
      5th September 2022, 7:03

      Would be good to get an article from Deiter on this.

      No more Dieter on this site :(

      1. Profile Photo

        Esploratore (@esploratore1)
        5th September 2022, 19:02

        I noticed his last post was in january, did he announce he’d leave? I haven’t seen anything.

  3. Profile Photo

    JohnH (@johnrkh)
    5th September 2022, 4:33

    What I have read elsewhere is RB (Horner presumably) wants Porsche to share its engine tech with RB Powertrains, Porsche understandably is saying no so the deal has stalled. I believe a similar issue arose with Honda they also refused to share their IP with RB so they came to a commercial agreement for Honda to continue to build and service the PU till 2026.
    I don’t know how much Marko is involved in this but apparently, Horner is not part of the discussion when it comes to the big-picture decisions made by Marko and Dietrich Mateschitz.
    There is also the possibility that Honda may re-enter F1 not as an engine supplier but as has been written elsewhere a stand-alone team. But they don’t have the infrastructure to design and build a chassis, but guess who does and may be interested in entering F1…Andretti.
    So that could be interesting and perhaps open the door for the Andrettis to finally get access to F1, Andretti-Honda Racing?
    Dietrich Mateschitz is getting on and may be looking to get out splitting Alpha Tauri from Red bull, selling RB to Porsche, and Alpha Tauri to Andretti-Honda Racing perhaps?
    Just some thoughts it will be interesting over the next couple of seasons to see how things develop.

    1. Profile Photo

      Matthijs (@matthijs)
      5th September 2022, 9:32

      @johnrkh

      What I have read elsewhere is RB (Horner presumably) wants Porsche to share its engine tech with RB Powertrains, Porsche understandably is saying no

      While I understand the first, I don’t understand the latter. Why wouldn’t Porsche want to learn from RB Powertrains? Honda has shown that it is far more difficult to build a hybrid F1-engine and it took Honda 7 years to build the best F1-engine currently available. Porsche could learn from the (current) best engine supplier and the many mistakes they made along the way.

      1. Profile Photo

        JohnH (@johnrkh)
        5th September 2022, 12:55

        @matthijs You are under the impression that Honda and RB are in some type of engine development partnership. I’m not sure what RBpowertrains does excatly but it’s nothing to do with the Honda PU. Honda in no way shares its IP with Redbull. The Honda PU is built in Japan and shipped to GB and fitted to the RB chassis. It is fully maintained by Honda engineers if a rebuild is necessary it’s sent back to Japan. There is no sharing of information in regard to the PU.
        Honda is not going to share information with RB or anyone else.

        1. Profile Photo

          Matthijs (@matthijs)
          5th September 2022, 13:27

          @johnrkh Fair point. I don’t know all details. What I do know is that RB Powertrains is a development of the 2021-Honda package and it is currently the best package on the grid. What I also know is that it took Honda 7 years to get there.

          I can fully understand that Porsche wants to develop their own powertrain for the road relevance development of their own road cars. But if Red Bull AND Porsche want to hit the ground running, it only seem foolish not to learn from the RB Powertrains.

          1. Profile Photo

            Matthijs (@matthijs)
            5th September 2022, 13:29

            @johnrkh Sorry, I only understood your comment after reading it twice. Do you mean that Honda is still providing the PU in 2022 and that RB (Powertrains) have no information about that engine?

          2. Profile Photo

            Andy (@andyfromsandy)
            5th September 2022, 16:27

            Not only is Honda providing the PU in 2022 but will continue to do so until the end of 2025.

          3. anon
            6th September 2022, 16:03

            @matthijs it is entirely because of the fact that there was the possibility of Red Bull partnering with Porsche that Honda is retaining full control of their power units.

            Red Bull was originally trying to buy the intellectual property rights to Honda’s powertrain, with the hope of acquiring those rights at the end of 2022. However, when it became known that Red Bull was also talking to the VW Group, Honda decided that they did not want any possibility that their technical knowledge to be transmitted through Red Bull to the VW Group and they refused to allow any transfer of intellectual property from themselves to Red Bull.

            All of the intellectual property rights to the current power unit thus remain with Honda, and will do so until new power unit regulations are introduced. As noted by JohnH, the original plans to transfer part of the maintenance and production work to Red Bull Powertrains was also rejected by Honda, which has insisted on retaining full control over the production process and maintenance of the power units, with the power units being transferred to and from Honda’s factories as a sealed unit.

  4. Profile Photo

    Jere (@jerejj)
    5th September 2022, 8:02

    & why should he leave because of Porsche anyway?

    Regarding Will’s tweet, the difference is that Naoki only drove in an FP1 & driving in FP has different SL requirements than actually racing in F1, so somewhat apples to oranges comparison.
    Belatedly giving points for the 2018 IndyLights campaign would be fair, though, as long as all affected drivers also get.

    Good COTD & I share the view thoroughly.

    1. anon
      6th September 2022, 20:17

      @jerejj the claims going round suggested it wouldn’t be a voluntary departure by Horner – instead, the claim has been that Porsche think Horner is unfit to lead the team and want to fire him, with Seidl taking over Horner’s role. That, in turn, has led to the claim that, as he doesn’t want to be fired, Horner is trying to kill off the deal to protect his own role within Red Bull.

  5. Profile Photo

    ferrox glideh (@ferrox-glideh)
    5th September 2022, 23:44

    I really enjoyed the cyclekart article and cyclekarts.com is just what the internet was made for.

  6. Delphi
    7th September 2022, 4:08

    When CH says there’s no truth to a rumour…

Comments are closed.