This is hardly Mercedes’ fault, though. After a winter of minimal regulation changes, the latest instalment of the Silver Arrow happens to have become, in the manner of Vettel’s ‘Kinky Kylie’ — the name he bestowed upon the RB7 chassis in 2011 — an unassailable machine. With 19 races to go, it is incumbent upon the rest to graft, not to gripe. After all, there is no record of Mercedes having grumbled about quitting when Vettel kept streaking over the horizon in a purple-and-yellow blur. And yet the German’s pre-eminence was, to all besides kitchen-fitters in the Milton Keynes area, ready to pounce on the five-figure bonuses that every employee at the Red Bull factory received for winning the championship, no less deathly for F1’s image.
• Formula One’s teams ranked by David Coulthard
• Red Bull threaten to quit Formula One
• Hamilton: I’d beat any driver in the same car
• Ecclestone: Red Bull right to be upset by Mercedes dominance
So, the hypocrisy of Red Bull’s position is astounding. Horner declares that the FIA, F1’s governing body, ought to invoke the “equalisation mechanism” within their rulebook to level out the competition, as if there is one set of protocols for Mercedes and another for all their rivals.
Except there are few companies in sport who love being in control as much as Red Bull. In most of their other adrenalin-junkie dabbling, from air-racing to extreme diving to motocross, they set the rules and put on the events to create their own self-governing circus. The impression is that Mateschitz, sequestered in his Salzburg lair, is growing disillusioned with F1 simply because of his inability to dictate events to the same degree.
There is talk that Dietrich Mateschitz (right) is becoming disillusioned
In sport, dynasties rise and fall. And at the pinnacle of motor racing, the power shifts constantly. For the past 15 years, marques from McLaren to Ferrari, Red Bull to Mercedes, have seized the constructors’ championships by vast margins. But until Horner’s outburst, there was no impulse for a team principal to “cry out”, in Toto Wolff’s words, after the first race.
There was, admittedly, a sense that both Horner and Helmut Marko, the outspoken team director, were simply doing the boss’s bidding.
We will never know for certain, since Mateschitz never grants interviews, but given that he is understood to be dismayed by the decline in results and the departure of Vettel for Ferrari, the sense grows that Red Bull are seriously considering their exit strategy.
That is a great pity. Beyond the fact that such a move would strip F1 of a fifth of its grid, it suggests that sport for Red Bull is little more than a billionaire’s exercise in glory-hunting. They have spent the last decade seeking to associate their brand with adventure, danger, and pulling off the notionally impossible — think of Felix Baumgartner’s space dive, for one — but at the first sign of threat on the track they look to run for the hills.
Greatness in sport was never meant to exist in perpetuity. Some of the richest men on the planet had to fail, and fail again, before their sporting dreams came to fruition.
If Mateschitz throws a tantrum and walks away now, he risks leaving a feeling that his involvement in F1 was only ever about cold commercial calculation. Red Bull gives you wings, or so the slogan goes.
But it is telling how petulantly the power-brokers react once those wings are clipped.