So Horner is the antidote to perceptions of Red Bull as a byword for austere
Mitteleuropa cool. There is even a touch of the James Hunt about him, given
that he chased the driving dream himself. Racing for Arden, a team he
established with his own money, he competed in Formula 3000 throughout 1997
until a best finish of 17th convinced him that such ambitions were illusory.
As he put it: “I was OK – but in this business OK just isn’t going to cut
it.”
Fortuitously, he forged a relationship in those years with Helmut Marko, Red
Bull’s ebullient motorspot director, courtesy of the team’s junior
programme. And as his Arden team went on to dominate F3000 when he moved to
the managerial side, Horner claims he felt ready to graduate to F1 when the
call came, even if it was still extraordinarily early. As team prinicipal he
occupied the same level as McLaren’s
Ron Dennis or Jean Todt at Ferrari
and yet he was younger than several of the drivers. Rather like his protégé
Vettel, he has rewritten the standards for precocity.
There have, fleetingly, been challenges to his authority, not least when
Horner saw his team orders at Sepang last season brazenly disregarded as
Vettel, in high dudgeon at being told to hold station behind leader Webber,
simply overtook him for the first of 13 triumphs in 2013. The impression it
gave was of the collective cause being secondary to Vettel’s one-eyed
ambition, and of Horner as a helpless onlooker – a charge he emphatically
disputed.
Although the German is understood to have been severely admonished for his
lapse in discipline, the words were exchanged almost entirely behind closed
doors. Any cracks in team unity did not last.
Instead Horner can reflect upon a groaning haul of 47 wins in just 165 races
under his tutelage, a total set in sharp relief when one considers McLaren
failed to finish on the podium throughout the 2013 season. ‘Coach of the
year’, while possibly a misnomer, would be fitting reward for such utter
domination, especially when it comes with Horner’s debonair stamp all over
it.