- Christian Horner’s tell all memoir “DRIVE” was released on October 22, the same day Helmut Marko dismissed its claims as “a collection of untruths.”
- Horner reveals he suffered undiagnosed panic attacks during his nearly 20 years running Red Bull, and that he and Marko have had no relationship since his sacking.
- Horner was fired days after his first wife died of eye cancer, and says Marko never offered condolences, calling that not “exactly the done thing.”
A Body Telling Him He Was Pushing Too Hard
Christian Horner did not know what was happening to him the first time it hit. He felt dizzy. He became aware of his own breathing in a way that frightened him. He blamed too much coffee on a muggy day and moved on. When it happened again, doctors found nothing physically wrong. The cause, they told him eventually, was anxiety and shallow breathing brought on by the pressure of running one of Formula 1’s most successful teams for almost two decades. “My body telling me you’re pushing pretty hard,” is how Horner now describes it, in a memoir released on October 22 that pulls back a curtain he kept firmly shut for most of his career.
The book, titled DRIVE, lands as the same kind of news Formula 1 rarely gets from Horner himself. He led Red Bull Racing for nearly 20 years after Dietrich Mateschitz appointed him team principal in his early thirties, winning eight drivers’ championships, six constructors’ titles and 124 of the team’s 130 grand prix victories along the way. He says he now recognizes the symptoms of a panic attack and can manage them. He did not always have that ability, and for most of his tenure, the sport had no idea he needed it.
Fired Days After a Death in the Family
Horner was removed as Red Bull team principal in July 2025, days after that year’s British Grand Prix, ending a run that had turned a team reportedly bought for one pound into one of the most valuable organizations in world sport. He calls the firing “particularly brutal” and “very very painful,” and says he did not fully process it until roughly a month later, because his attention was consumed by something far heavier. Just days before his own sacking, his first wife, Beverley Allen, the mother of his daughter Olivia, died after a battle with cancer of the eye. “Nothing was more important than that,” Horner has said of the weeks that followed, describing an 11 year old child grieving her mother while her father was simultaneously losing the job that had defined his adult life.
He has pointed to Toto Wolff’s own public openness about depression as something he admired, and has spoken about how the loss of a career identity can hit middle aged men particularly hard, a dynamic he says he recognized in himself only once the job was gone.
Radio Silence With the Man Who Brought Him In
Of everyone in the Horner saga, none looms larger than Helmut Marko, the 83 year old Red Bull motorsport advisor who first recruited Horner into Formula 1 from the Arden junior team and later backed him for the top job. “We don’t have one,” Horner says bluntly of their relationship now. He describes their last day together at the team: the two of them sitting in his office, shaking hands, and then nothing. “Radio silence ever since.” He says it “really got to me” that Marko was so actively involved in his removal, and that Marko never reached out after Beverley Allen’s death, calling that not “exactly the done thing.”
Horner is careful to separate the debt from the breach. He says he owes Marko “a great deal” for the early backing that put him in the job in the first place, and locates the turning point precisely: “the break came with Dietrich’s death,” Mateschitz having died in 2022. Horner describes the years after as a scramble for influence inside the team, saying that in the push to seem relevant, “knowledge was that currency,” and that he was often the one cleaning up the fallout. Asked directly if that was the case, he answered simply: “Sometimes, yes.” On Marko’s management approach generally, he has said it “wasn’t how I would deal with things,” adding that he often felt he was “mopping up” after him.
The book also revisits the signing that shaped Red Bull’s modern era. Horner says Marko was initially dismissive of a teenage Max Verstappen, allegedly warning him off because of his father. “The father’s a nightmare,” Horner recalls Marko saying of Jos Verstappen. “We don’t need this one.” Horner signed him anyway, a decision that produced four world championships for the team before Verstappen’s current contract runs through 2030.
Marko’s One Line Answer
Marko has chosen not to engage with any of it point by point. Asked about the book’s claims on the day of its release, his response was brief and dismissive. “That’s a collection of untruths,” he said. “I don’t want to go into them at all.” It echoed an almost identical line he had given days earlier to a different outlet, calling the same material “a collection of falsehoods” he did not want to discuss. Marko left Red Bull at the end of the 2025 season, shortly after Horner’s own departure, closing out a partnership that had defined two decades of Formula 1 before ending, by Horner’s own account, in a handshake and then silence.
A People Business, By His Own Framing
Horner has described DRIVE as “my reflection on an incredible 20 year journey and the many individuals who helped shape it,” and has said repeatedly that “Formula 1 is ultimately a people business.” He has also said he felt the team’s own account of his exit “portrayed the team in a way that wasn’t true to our character of who we were as an organisation,” adding that “certainly the people within Milton Keynes didn’t recognise that” version of events either. The book arrives as the paddock heads into the United States Grand Prix weekend at Austin, with Horner’s own future in the sport still unresolved and reportedly centered on finding an ownership position elsewhere rather than another team principal role. For a man who spent two decades controlling exactly what Formula 1 saw of him, DRIVE is the first time he has chosen to show it the parts he once kept to himself.
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