Christian Horner: We’ve not had a British driver recently, so we’re the public enemy

Here in the paddock at the Bahrain International Circuit, on the eve of the new Formula One season, envious eyes are turned towards the Red Bull team, wondering how or when anyone is going to beat them. “This paddock can be self-winding,” Horner says, enjoying the sight of the first blows of the season landing successfully.

Yet he is at ease with the reality, as he sees it, that this comparative tranquillity is short-lived. He expects to see “mud chucked”, he knows that “people are always going to have opinions” and that “there are always going to be rocks thrown”.

This, in the context, is his best line of all: “It does sit a little uneasy that the subsidiary of an energy drinks company can come in and do what we’ve done.”

And he is totally at ease with the fact that, in the great soap opera of the F1 game, he is portrayed as a kind of suave villain, an ice-in-the-veins killer winner, unflappable, never happier than when there is a foot on the throat of the opposition. “It’s a disadvantage,” he says, “that over the recent years we’ve never had a British driver. That makes you the public enemy when you are going up against a Jenson [Button] or a Lewis [Hamilton].”

That may go some way towards explaining the status quo, but Horner is not remotely motivated to change it. “You are not going to change who you are,” he says. “I am not going to change [my] personality to suit a narrative.

“I am who I am, I am comfortable in my own skin. I sleep well at night. People either like me or they don’t. That’s not going to change my life. So long as my family love me and I haven’t said anything that embarrasses my mother, I’m fine with that.”

In attempting to divine what makes him so sure of his footing, we go back 24 years. Horner can pinpoint the day, indeed the very turn, when he knew he wasn’t going to fulfil his dreams as a racing driver.

“Pre-season testing in Estoril,” he says, “coming out of the pitlane. There used to be a very fast double right-hander at the end of the straight.”

Horner was 25, driving in Formula 3000 for a team he was also running. “Exiting the pits, Juan Pablo Montoya passed me and came into this high-speed right-hand turn,” he recalls. “I could see the wheel rim trying to burst through the sidewall of the tyre, he was totally committed with the right foot. The guard rail was only metres from the outside of the circuit there. It was at that point that I thought: ‘I can’t do that.’

“It was the talent that he had. And the commitment was way beyond my capability. I just knew in my heart.

“The problem was I was too aware of the danger. You get to the higher echelons of the sport and it is very clear that you could get hurt and there is a self-defence mechanism built in and you then can’t disconnect brain from right foot.”

He then spoke to his family about it. He had found his limits. “It was then a matter of being honest with yourself,” he says. He vowed to see out the season and then stop. “With hindsight I should have stopped at that point. I shouldn’t have done the season. Why take the risk? Once you’ve made that decision, psychologically, you’ve checked out.”

How did he drive for the rest of the year? “Conservatively.”

He says that he can see it, now, when other drivers have reached the same point. He saw it in Sebastian Vettel last season, in David Coulthard in 2008. “Mentally they check out a bit. But once you’ve made the decision to stop, stop. In this sport it’s not like you’re holding a tennis racket, you are entering into a modern-day gladiatorial chariot.”

Yet Horner didn’t pause to mourn his own driving career. He just pushed for success outside the gladiatorial chariot rather than in it. “It’s what fires you up,” he says. “I am a competitive person.”

He was also already accumulating experience for his future. “At the time, I was already running the team. I was doing the VAT returns, booking the hotels, employing the mechanics, I was having to make sure that the sponsorship was there. Then it was: ‘Come on, Christian, can you get in the car because we’re racing in half an hour?’ Then there was the pressure of: I can’t afford to crash the car because I knew there wasn’t enough money in the bank to pay for the spares. It was completely the wrong dynamic as a driver, but it gave me a tremendous education of the bare bones of doing some of the harder jobs.”

He also believed that he knew exactly what was required outside the cockpit: “As a driver it’s quite a lonely environment. But what you would notice in the different teams I drove for – it was glaringly obvious to me – was that it was all about the people. And I enjoyed working with people and I felt I could get the best out of them.”

So when you ask Horner what it is that makes him the big alpha male of the pitlane, he doesn’t even mention his skill as a strategist. Instead it is the competitive fire that burns relentlessly and his role as a leader of people.

“My job and the way I see it is: I represent the 1,500 people that work in the organisation. My job is to defend that group of people and ensure that they are able to do their job unencumbered. If you’re in this team and under my responsibility, I’ll stand up for anybody and fight their corner. Sometimes that puts you front and centre publicly and that might be with an opinion that people don’t like.”

When he then names Sir Alex Ferguson as the kind of leader he would like to emulate, it is because of this very point: “He wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but he did what he believed was right and he always protected his team.”

There is a lot more about Ferguson that he likes. “He called it as he saw it,” he says. And Horner certainly does that.

Ferguson also succeeded with different generations and, as the longest-serving team principal in the paddock, Horner has that very much in mind: “He was able to reinvent teams as they progressed. I have huge respect for what he did.”

There is another talent that Horner shares with Ferguson: his ability to play the psychological game. “If he could wind a competitor up,” he says, “he would do it, because it would serve his own purpose – or his team’s purpose.”

And that brings us firmly back to his towering presence here in his own sport. He seems to know exactly how to spot weakness in the opposition and then how to exploit it to work to his team’s advantage.

“If a rival is offloading or losing it,” he says, “you know that the people around them will be feeling it. That’s part of competitive sport.”

It is clearly a part that he enjoys. As we await the opening race of the season tomorrow (Sunday) he is perfectly placed for more of it. He will be driving home Red Bull’s advantage and he won’t be remotely bothered with how that goes down outside of his team.

-The Times

Originally published as Christian Horner: We’ve not had a British driver recently, so we’re the public enemy