“There Was This Blame Culture” – Christian Horner Exposes Sensitive Details of F1 Team

As Ford decided to hand over their Jaguar F1 team to Red Bull in 2004, nobody expected the newly formed team to taste such huge success so early. Just 18 years after its formation, the Red Bull Racing team has taken itself to be compared with the likes of Ferrari, Mercedes, McLaren, and Williams. However, it was not easy to get in the right direction, as shared by Christian Horner.

Horner, the team principal of Red Bull, reveals the sensitive details of the blame culture that existed in the Jaguar team crew prior to the Bulls’ takeover as well as after the transfer process. The Briton also unraveled how he managed the team crew to join and come together and work under the right leadership, which included Adrian Newey.

In an interview with The Diary of A CEO, the 48-year-old executive shared, “There was this blame culture within the business where the drawing office blamed the aero, the aero blamed the wind tunnel… the R&D [Research and Development] blaming production, the race team were blamed everybody.”

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“I think it was the blame culture that there was no accountability or collective. No responsibility. So it was then a question of ‘okay how do we unpick that and how do we create the glue to bring this together? For me, what was really needed was the technical direction,” further asserted the Red Bull supremo.

How does Christian Horner’s Red Bull fare statistically in F1 in 2022?

As Dietrich Mateschitz took over Jaguar, he instilled Christian Horner as the team principal. Horner, who convinced Adrian Newey to join the team to take the team in a new direction has tasted huge success of late.

The Milton-Keynes-based team picked up four constructors’ championships, with one more to take at the end of 2022, and six driver’s championships. As of the 2022 Japanese Grand Prix, Red Bull picked up 89 race wins, 79 pole positions, and 229 podiums.

The team from Austria had 344 race starts so far, and their beginning race dates back to the 2005 Australian Grand Prix. Once known as customers, the Austrian team is on the brink to create their own power units in the days to come.

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Admittedly, the Bulls who used to take engines from Honda, Cosworth, Renault, Ferrari, and TAG Heuer, invested in building their own Powertrains last year. After Honda’s departure from the sports, Red Bull decided to be self-sufficient by 2026 with their own engines developed at a dedicated facility.