Christian Horner: The Truth Behind Red Bull Racing's Success!

Christian Horner (0:00)

It's a mental game, and when you see your counterpart smashing up headphones and landing at cameras, you know that you've got to.

SPEAKER_2 (0:07)

Christian Horner, the team boss of the world championship-winning team, Red Bull Racing.

Steven Bartlett (0:12)

You came into Red Bull when it wasn't doing great.

Christian Horner (0:16)

When I came into the sport, I was the youngest team principal in Formula One. I still am to this day, ironically, and I don't have any formal qualifications, bar a couple of A-levels. I wanted to make sure that we were the team on the upward graft and think, OK, how can we turn shit into fertiliser?

Steven Bartlett (0:32)

You can lose championships as we've seen in seconds.

Christian Horner (0:36)

It felt like it was slipping away and then suddenly it was insane. If somebody came out with a script and said, that's the way the season is going to pan out, nobody would have believed it.

Steven Bartlett (0:47)

All that press scrutiny.

Christian Horner (0:51)

Formula One is a very glamorous world from the outside looking in. It can be a lonely place at times.

Steven Bartlett (0:58)

Have you ever had moments of anxiety?

Christian Horner (1:01)

It sort of crept up on me without, you know, recognizing it.

And it's just your body telling you that there's a lot going on here. And for me, I've had enough.

Steven Bartlett (1:16)

When you look at your competition, which has been Mercedes, why do you think your team will win?

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Christian, there's a slight pun, I guess, to this opening question, but as I look back into your early years, and as you look back in hindsight and sort of self-assess, what drives you?

Christian Horner (2:21)

What drives me? I'm naturally a competitive person, and I've always enjoyed competition. I've always enjoyed working within a team of people, and winning. Winning, there's just no feeling like it.

Whether it's achieving a chequered flag first or sealing a deal to get on a car, that's always what's driven me, has always been about the competition.

Steven Bartlett (2:50)

In our earliest years, I think the psychology shows that we're formed most definitively by the things that happen, the context we're growing up in, our older brothers, the parenting. When you look back and connect those dots, is there anything else there that is important context to who you are today?

Christian Horner (3:09)

Well, I'm the middle child of three, so my older brother was the sensible one of the three boys.

And then my younger brother was more outrageous, I would say. And the middle child is always that slightly awkward one, particularly within three. So I didn't excel at school. I wasn't that interested in school. School for me was almost like a social thing, but I enjoyed sport and I enjoyed team sport at school. So where my older brother was quite academic, he was crap at sport, whereas I played in the football team or the cricket team or whatever was going. And I just enjoyed that. And I think that being a middle child, you're always slightly different.

The younger ones always ends up being the spoiled one. The older ones are sensible one. And the middle one tends to be in his own lane, certainly from the middle children I've met.

Steven Bartlett (4:15)

What did you think you were going to be when you grew up?

Christian Horner (4:17)

I wanted to be Evil Knievel. I wanted to be a stunt man.

And then there was a program, the Fall Guy with Lee Majors in it, who drove around in a big truck and so on. I was a stunt man. I thought that was super cool. So I was always fascinated by cars and speed and so on.

So that attracted me to just the world of engines. And from a very early age, from about 12, I was pestering and pestering my mom because I knew my father wouldn't buy me one to buy a motorized go-kart. And I saved up what I had. And then for my 12th birthday, we found this thing in the back of a newspaper, this secondhand 20-year-old go-kart. And it was too low to drive around a farm or on the grass. So we found a track. And suddenly I discovered this, you could race these things. And suddenly that whetted my appetite at a very young age.