Christian Horner: The showman Red Bull chief who married a Spice Girl

Christian Horner is the showman Red Bull chief who masterminded an all-conquering era in Formula One and became almost as famous as his drivers.

Oozing with self-confidence, Horner was just 31 years old when he took over as principal for the team’s first start on an F1 grid in 2005. Since then, he has gone on to win seven drivers’ championships and six constructors’ championships. However, it is the fly-on-the-wall era of sports documentary-making and his marriage to a former Spice Girl that has secured Horner as a household name as instantly recognisable as even his top driver Max Verstappen.

Horner’s fierce rivalry with Mercedes’ Toto Wolff was laid bare in Netflix’s Drive to Survive series, with cameras following their every move, to give them an unlikely profile that now transcends F1.

Exchanges between the pair were box-office viewing in 2021 when Verstappen snatched championship victory from Lewis Hamilton in Abu Dhabi. For years since, Horner has revelled in his role as villain for Hamilton fans. “Mercedes f----- up,” he said on Sky’s League Of Their Own in December. “They left poor Lewis out there on tyres that had done pretty much most of the race and we’d pitted with Max, so he was on a fresh set of tyres.”

A year ago, in an extensive interview with Telegraph Sport, Horner joked that, after that race, “for your average Lewis fan I’m probably some sort of anti-christ”.

“But I make no apology for standing up for my team,” he added. “I am protective of them and I wear my heart on my sleeve. I know we didn’t cheat last year. I’m 100 per cent comfortable with that.”

When Horner is not at a race, he is commuting to Red Bull’s factory in Milton Keynes where he doubles as chief executive of Red Bull Racing, Red Bull Powertrains and Red Bull Advanced Technologies. In total he is responsible for around 1,500 employees.

“I also think people forget, Red Bull Racing is an incredible success story for this country too,” he previously told Telegraph Sport. “Of course we are Austrian-owned and we are proud of that. But we’re a British-based team with a British team principal and 85 per cent of our workforce must be British.”

Horner has become a face synonymous with the sport’s modern era, having not missed a single grand prix, even for illness, since 2005. When he turned 50 in November, Verstappen presented him with one of his race-winning helmets.

However, Horner is often painted as the bad guy by F1 fans in this country. Aside from the controversial manner of Verstappen’s title victory in 2021, a budget-cap row, when Red Bull were found to have overspent and slapped with a $7 million fine and aerodynamic testing restrictions, has not helped.

But a perception that Horner is too smug and pleased with himself is firmly rejected by wife Geri Horner [née Halliwell], the former pop singer and now children’s book author.

“What I do know about my husband is he’s a good person, he’s an honest person, and he cares deeply about his team and the sport,” she said last year. “He’s actually a very straightforward guy. He’s a racer through and through.”

The Horners’ high-profile relationship has faced much scrutiny, with reports that Horner’s parents were initially unhappy about the way things ended with his former partner, Beverley, soon after their daughter Olivia’s birth. Horner insists that is behind them now.

Horner married Halliwell in Bedfordshire in 2015 and he insisted last year that the relationship between his ex-wife, Geri and children is now “totally harmonious”.

Away from F1, the Horners have developed a passion for horse racing, having built new stables for 14 horses at their Oxfordshire home, including two foaling stalls. They also took on a full-time trainer, ex-jockey Maxine Filby, to run their yard for them.

Horner, a former Formula 3000 driver himself, joined team Red Bull, the Austrian energy drink manufacturer, as it entered F1 under the leadership of founder Dietrich Mateschitz, who died in October 2022.

Horner’s long-term plan for Red Bull and immediate success helped land superstar drivers and youthful prospects including Verstappen. Having received an OBE in 2013, he was appointed a CBE in the New Year’s Honours list last year after Red Bull won all but one of the grands prix in the 2023 season.

Horner is now the longest-serving team principal in the sport but still one of its youngest as the F1 prepares for another major test of his powers. A new car for this season will be unveiled in the coming weeks, but it is the 2026 season, which will see more electrical power as well as 100 per cent sustainable fuels, that will be the great unknown for Horner and his contemporaries.