The scandal that the fastest race team can't outrun
Plus, the Toronto Blue Jays after a month: Meh
The 2024 Formula 1 season has been boring from a competition perspective, with Red Bull Racing and Max Verstappen having been unbeatable provided his car does not self-destruct at some point during the race.
Off the track, though, it has been bananas. As the series touches down in Miami this week, F1 is dealing with the latest fallout in what is the strangest sports scandal in recent memory.
Adrian Newey, the Red Bull chief designer who is credited with building the cars that delivered two dominant stretches since the team launched in 2006 — minus a lengthy Mercedes interlude when it was top of the class — has decided to leave the team next year. This would be a big deal on its own, but it comes as Red Bull is mired in an ongoing controversy involving team principal Christian Horner. Newey and Horner both put out statements this week saying all the normal things about new challenges and past successes but there were reports before the announcement that Newey was “uncomfortable” with the Horner-related furore.
About that: The short version is that before the season began, a female Red Bull employee accused Horner of unspecified improper behaviour. A third-party investigation was launched, Horner was cleared, and that seemed like it might be it. But it also emerged that Horner was in something of a power struggle with senior Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko, who sounds like a Bond villain but is not. Also, someone leaked a bunch of purported text messages between Horner and the employee to media, but the contents of those haven’t been disclosed, because no one seems to know if they are real. Along the way, Max Verstappen’s father, Jos, suggested Horner was tearing the team apart, Max intimated that he would leave Red Bull if Marko was no longer there, and Horner has repeatedly tried to say that all this is behind them and the team is united. But it’s a little like saying “nothing to see here, move along” while the house bursts into flames right behind you.
The Newey departure, if it is linked to the Horner-related circus and not just the case of a guy looking for new challenges, would be the first instance of the controversy having a material, and possibly devastating over the long term, impact on Red Bull Racing. At the least, if Newey does just want a fresh start somewhere else, he picked a strange time to announce it — just as his boss struggles to throw a metaphorical blanket over the flames.
The bizarre thing about all of this is that it remains genuinely unclear what happened with Horner. Normally these things get revealed to some degree, whether through the courts or the media. But the UK has laws intended to shield people from the damage of false accusations, so all of the coverage of the Horner situation has been very careful to avoid specifics. He’s only ever said to have used “controlling and coercive” behaviour toward the female employee. That could mean, obviously, a lot of things. It doesn’t necessarily exclude the kind of behaviour that would be a firing offence if true, but it could also just mean the employee thought he was rude to her.
Adding to the uncertainty is the big leak that came just after Horner was first cleared, with a raft of F1 officials and media receiving screenshots of the alleged text exchanges from an anonymous account. This was terrible whistleblower strategy. If you want someone to publish your damning evidence, you have to provide it to them in some fashion that allows them to verify its accuracy. You should also leak to a specific outlet, which then has this information to itself and is highly motivated to prove that it is true so it can publish. In this case, the mass anonymous dump meant that any reporter who was able to successfully prove whether the texts were true would only end up confirming the information that all the other media outlets already had. Suddenly, everyone would have the story, even if you were the only one who did the work to make it publishable.
Horner, who is one of the bigger non-driver celebrities in F1, has said all along that he has done nothing wrong. He’s been with Red Bull from the start, is married to pop star Geri Haliwell, formerly Ginger Spice, and is one of the main characters on Drive to Survive — which is to say, he’s comfortable sitting in front of the cameras and talking shit about his competitors. He’s a big target. But because all of this is so vague, it’s impossible to know if he’s being protected by a team and sport that doesn’t want the bad publicity of his downfall, or if he’s being unfairly accused by a sour colleague. Or worse, that the whole thing was a hit job as part of the ongoing bun fight with the Bond villain.
The craziest thing about all this? As mentioned, Red Bull is absolutely killing it on the track. In terms of the championship, this season was over before it even started. Which, I guess, is the upside of all the off-track Red Bull shenanigans: at least it gives the media something else to talk about.
Bo, no
My latest piece for theScore, which is an app you should all have on your phones, considers the state of the Toronto Blue Jays after the first month of the season. In a word: Sigh.
But it’s early! So there’s that.