Horner settles scores with Newey: the crack goes back to 2014

A book, and some targets

Christian Horner no longer has a team, but he now has a book. Titled "Drive", it comes out on 22 October, and the first extracts, published by The Times, set the tone. The former Red Bull boss, dismissed in July 2025 right after the British Grand Prix, looks back on twenty years in Milton Keynes. He spares no one: Helmut Marko and Toto Wolff both take hits. But it is the passage about Adrian Newey that is making the most noise.

The Horner-Newey pairing was the backbone of Red Bull's success: Vettel's titles between 2010 and 2013, then the Verstappen era and the near-unbeatable RB19 of 2023. From the outside, they looked inseparable. Horner tells a different story.

2014, the year it cracked

It all starts in 2014. The hybrid era begins, Mercedes crushes the field and Red Bull is stuck with a struggling Renault engine. Vettel eventually heads to Ferrari. And Ferrari, as it happens, is courting Newey too. According to Horner, the British engineer seriously considered leaving at the worst possible moment for the team. The former principal sums it up by saying Newey wanted to jump ship at the first sign of trouble.

Newey stayed in the end. But for Horner, the damage was done. He says that from then on he could no longer fully rely on him, and that their partnership was less solid than he had believed. A surprising admission, given the two men worked together for another decade and delivered some of the finest seasons in recent history.

It says a lot about Horner too

It is hard not to read these lines in light of what came next. Newey announced his exit in 2024, amid a very tense internal climate around his team principal, before joining Aston Martin in spring 2025. Horner was pushed out a few months later. Each man has his own version of events, and Horner's has the advantage of arriving first.

The former boss still disputes the reasons for his dismissal. He points out that the results were there before he left and suggests Red Bull's decline was not his doing. He even jokes about his public image with a Darth Vader comparison, as if to say the tough paddock persona hid someone more human. The message is clear: Horner wants to rewrite his own story before others do it for him.

Timing that is anything but random

These extracts land just as Horner is clearly looking for a way back. His name keeps coming up around Ferrari, to the point that Frédéric Vasseur had to respond to the rumours in Baku, with a jab about Horner looking for a job. Meanwhile, Newey is going through a tough season at Aston Martin, where the Honda engine is still lagging: the Japanese manufacturer itself admitted this weekend that it is running out of solutions.

Red Bull, for its part, has just had its best weekend of the year in Baku, with Verstappen and Hadjar both on the podium, without Horner or Newey. A detail that makes this public airing of grievances all the more bitter for the former boss.

Newey, true to form, may well choose not to respond publicly. But the book isn't out yet, and if it holds more passages like this one, the paddock will be talking about it until the end of the season.