SimplyAbuDhabi XLII

In Horner’s first team-management role at Arden, the Formula 3000 team he founded in 1997, he was responsible for about 15 people. Then, “it was the pressures of a small business,” he says. “I was booking the hotels, doing the payroll, the invoices, the VAT returns. It was very much hand to mouth, hoping payments came in while writing cheques going out.” Horner now presides over 1,500 people at the factory in Milton Keynes, but that “explosive growth” has rarely altered what underpins his ap- proach. “We have a can-do culture here. ‘No’ is not an option,” he says. “I tell the people they’re here because we believe they’re the best at what they do. I’m just asking them to go that one extra yard because we have to beat some mighty opponents and they won’t be taking it easy.” It is inevitable that Red Bull’s success will always be measured against Mercedes’s, just as Horner is always pitted against Toto Wolff, his coun- terpart. Both have enjoyed periods of immense success, with Sebastian Vettel’s four titles followed by Hamilton winning six of the next seven, but Horner points out that he lost none of his key staff during that relative slump, during a time in which “people can start to question their place in the organisation.” It is a thinly veiled reference to the number of engineers who have come over from Mercedes in recent years, and the comparisons are as constant as the rivalry is often bitter. In 2021, Wolff even instructed every member of staff at Mercedes’s factory to find their Red Bull counterpart and look at a picture of them every day “so you know who to beat.” Horner laughs when asked if he has employed similar tactics. “They have people doing analysis on how we operate, what we eat. It’s about what we do, not what anyone else does. We’ve hired a bunch of people from a bunch of different teams. No one mentions, ‘At Mercedes we did this’.” Photo by Chris Graythen 126 | Simply Abu Dhabi