If Horner’s schedule—and the amount of attention he received—was any indication, year two of F1’s new and overt emphasis on the American market was going as planned. America, you might have heard, has fallen, and fallen hard, for the world’s favorite motorsport: this year the States will play host to three races, more than any other country, with a brand-new Grand Prix set for the Vegas strip later this fall. The race in Miami—the Crypto.com Miami Grand Prix, in full—was shaping up in its second-ever running to be yet another big weekend for Horner’s team. Heading into the race, Red Bull had won 15 of the series’s previous 16 races, a stretch of success punctuated by Verstappen wrapping up his second consecutive world championship in dominant fashion, and underscored this spring by the widely held belief that no one on the grid had constructed a car capable of competing with Red Bull’s.
“Winning is addictive, and once you’ve sampled it, you want to keep that feeling going,” Horner told me. “We’ve won, as a team, 96 races in the last 18 and a half seasons. And each one of those means something.” As those wins have accrued, they’ve helped turn Red Bull from a renegade upstart—“We are a subsidiary of an energy drinks company,” he reminded me, repeating a favorite line—to something like the Death Star. Despite his team’s recent dominance, Horner knows just as well what it’s like to be pushing from behind: the team was founded in 2005, and by 2010 set off on a streak of four consecutive titles—and then went quiet for nearly a decade, as Mercedes ripped off a dominant run of eight straight championships, before climbing back to the top. In his nearly 20 years running Red Bull, he has come to learn what a win feels like—its weight, its shape, its cost. “When you’re the hunter, it’s almost easier. The pressure is less. You take more risks,” he said, referring to the rest of the field. “When you become a hunted, where we are now, you very much have a target on your back. The moment you go conservative, that’s not who we are. So our best approach is to keep attacking, keep pushing, and keep driving ourselves forward. And then it’s down to the others to catch, rather than us becoming conservative.”
One thing that helps keep Horner sharp is Red Bull’s rivalry with Mercedes. A running subplot of Drive to Survive, and of F1 media more generally, is the sniping between Horner and his Mercedes counterpart, Toto Wolff. The two make for an easy contrast. Horner is compact and blunt-spoken; Wolff, tall and unusually handsome and quick to laugh. While drivers have criticized the Netflix series for the way it seems to embellish drama, the Horner-Wolff dynamic doesn’t seem to be kayfabe. “Look, competition in sport is a healthy thing, and I don’t believe you can be best friends with your rivals,” Horner said. “There has to be a respect, but they’re a rival—you want to beat them. And we’re very honest in our approach. We see Mercedes and Ferrari as our rivals, and being best friends with them doesn’t help you.”
Sam Schube
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