So if the parent Red Bull company deems it necessary to release Horner (depending upon the investigation’s outcome into the allegations that Horner denies), it’s not obvious how he can be replaced. Especially as the running of it has now become necessarily more complex through the establishment of Red Bull Powertrains. Even as the team has grown, it has retained a simplicity of purpose: a lean, adaptive, ingenious racing operation, intensely competitive and that environment has attracted like-minded high-calibre people. When that was coupled with the massive budget of the owner but left to be run by the racing people without any of the corporate entanglements which tend over time to slow F1 teams, it became the colossus that it is. But it’s been Horner who has done the running of it and he’s done it in accordance with the singularity of purpose and simplicity arising from his own vision. With the late Dietrich Mateschitz replaced by more conventional management at the parent company, there has inevitably been a power vacuum. If that management views any Horner misbehaviour as an opportunity rather than a very serious blow, it should not.
There are very experienced racing people there fully capable of keeping it all functioning. There are doubtless good corporate managers at the parent company capable of looking after the business side of it. But without the man at the core of it all from the start, the tentacles of resistance will already be growing, unseen, the barnacles will be growing on the hull. Key personnel will leave over time, certain decisions will be made without an appreciation of the impact, the environment in which the team competes will itself change, as it always does. All these developments will require a confidence-inspiring leader with binding ethos shared by everyone else there. Not so easy to magic up one of those.