Tense Horner moment sparks priceless reaction from Brown and Wolff

In the opening episode of season eight, titled New Kids on the Track, the focus turned to the F175 event — the large-scale joint launch held last year, where all ten teams unveiled the liveries of their cars during the same evening.

In the clip, Horner can be seen being loudly booed by the crowd inside London’s O2 Arena, something the now former Red Bull team principal and CEO commented on during the episode: “When you become a serial winner, the audience, they don't want to see that. In F1 there's this element of pantomime. We're now like the Kardashians on wheels, but I'm way past even caring what other people think.”

McLaren CEO Zak Brown also featured in the episode, commenting on what happened to Horner: “To go up there and then come sit down next to your team, your sponsors, that would be pretty uncomfortable.”

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff also shared his view, adding: “I didn't hope that he went up there on stage like, I'm going to rock the room, and then the room rocked him.”

Horner finally added: “That's what makes us who we are. This isn't a popularity contest, it's F1 and you're judged on the result sheet at the end of the day. It's easier to be the hunter rather than the hunted and of course for us anything outside of total domination, you know, it's not good enough.”

Speaking in the upcoming season of Drive to Survive, set to be released on Friday, the 52-year-old revealed that while he had consistently backed the promotion of drivers from Red Bull’s junior programme, he commented that the call to replace both drivers after only two races was largely driven by the team’s Austrian advisor.

He said that the push to select talent from the Red Bull junior system had always been strong internally, emphasising the significant influence Helmut Marko held in shaping those decisions.