Horner mentions culture change in F1: 'Wolff and I are the last two'

Christian Horner sounds somewhat melancholic when he talks about the F1 team bosses of the past, when he just became Red Bull Racing team boss in 2005. Noticing a culture change in F1, the Briton cites Toto Wolff as the only remaining 'dinosaur' besides himself.

F1 team bosses gone by the bushes

Things did went very rapid in 2022. A veritable silly season concerning F1 team bosses emerged at the end of the year. There are four teams with new team bosses since this year, two were also replaced the year before. Franz Tost will also step down from AlphaTauri as team boss as of 2024. It means that on the current grid, only Horner, Wolff and Guenther Steiner have been team bosses at the same team for more than five years.

Horner looks back on the last 20 years and seems to prefer back then over now. Horner says to EPSN: "When I first came into the sport, there was Ron Dennis, Flavio Briatore, Eddie Jordan and Jean Todt. There was Bernie Ecclestone running it, there was Max Mosley there [at the head of the FIA], Frank Williams. These were some really big characters with their own personalities. Right now you look around the room, and maybe it is me just getting older, but there's more managers there. It has become more technical and to the entrepreneurial side."

Horner misses the characters in F1

In his story, Horner mentions very prominent names in Formula 1's history and notices a culture change among the bosses from strong characters to more technical and businesslike managers. Horner: "I suppose, Toto and I are perhaps two of the more dinosaur-type of characters. Even though I'm still on the younger side of the team principles, but the dynamic and the definition of what a team principal is these days are very different from when I first came into the sport."

With Frederic Vasseur at Ferrari and the James Vowles at Williams, there are certainly still capable and experienced F1 men at the head of certain F1 teams, but it is the characters that Horner misses: "Many of them are no morphing from a technical background. where they are focussed on technical and perhaps sportin regulations. While I'm actually thinking about the business and the bigger picture."