The Horner-Verstappen family feud is premium grade fuel for Formula 1 drama
It seems a long time ago now that Formula One car racing had much to do with cars.
The first race of the year was on Saturday – the Bahrain Grand Prix.
Red Bull’s Max Verstappen won. Red Bull’s Sergio Perez was second. One or the other of them has won 32 of the past 34 Grand Prix races.
Competitively, that is a recipe for apathy. Who wants to watch a couple of dozen go-karts chase a pair of hot rods around a parking lot for two hours?
Formula One has solved this problem by de-emphasizing the races and foregrounding the personalities. And the personalities are straight out of a 10-hour jag in the Bravo writers’ room.
The big thing right now is Christian Horner. He is the haughty principal at Red Bull. He is also married to a Spice Girl. Based on appearance and carriage, he is the king of the sport.
But watching a not-very-relatable guy bask in his own achievements doesn’t attract a global audience. Watching that same guy get repeatedly slapped in the face does.
Over the winter, Horner was slowly lowered into the pot of a sexual-harassment scandal involving an unidentified female member of the Red Bull team. Slowly, because the story did not suddenly appear, as these stories usually do. Instead, it began with rumours of friction within the team. Then there were dark suggestions that someone had done something they oughtn’t have.
After weeks spent building up a head of media steam, this slow-rolling disaster finally worked its way up to headlines wondering why Geri (Ginger Spice) Halliwell didn’t appear her usual effervescent self at the Cotswolds cotillion, followed by announcements of a not-at-all arm’s-length investigation by Red Bull into Horner’s behaviour.
A few of the squalid details of the story were leaked through Dutch outlets. Verstappen is Dutch. His bull-in-a-bomb-shop father, Jos, is extremely Dutch.
The inquiry took weeks to complete, creating a tabloid frenzy. The probe wasn’t resolved until days before the start of the season. You’ll never guess how it ended – with Horner cleared of wrongdoing.
Most sports leagues wouldn’t have milked it even this much, but Formula One dares to go further.
On the eve of the race, an unidentified source e-mailed all the confidential Horner material to everyone who’s anyone in Formula 1.
It’s not exactly X-rated stuff. It’s more along the lines of desperate teenage stuff. When you are a man such as Horner, who has spent decades cultivating an image as an auto-racing aristocrat, that is even more damaging.
On race day, no one cared about what car was starting where. Instead, everyone was there to see Halliwell. Buckets of British ink had been spilled about how her husband’s troubles were affecting her.
She and Horner arrived at the paddock hand in hand – because I’m sure your spouse also walks you to work like a kindergartener.
They went in through the public entrance, which insiders never use. They stood in a public area chatting with people in full view of photographers, which insiders also don’t do. Horner and Halliwell both made a great show of cozying up with Chalerm Yoovidhya, head of the Thai dynasty that owns a majority of Red Bull.
The race that followed was a procession. Verstappen won by a desert mile.
Afterward, everyone on Red Bull said nice, anodyne things about where the team’s at. Horner kept banging on about the team’s togetherness and singularity of purpose. In that moment, it was possible to believe that winning solves everything.
Then the Daily Mail dropped an interview with Verstappen’s father. It landed like a dragnet on Horner’s escape act.
“The team is in danger of being torn apart,” the Mail quoted Jos Verstappen as saying at some unspecified point on the race weekend. “It can’t go on the way it is. It will explode. He is playing the victim, when he is the one causing problems.”
The quotes are one thing. The timing is another. That it comes out after everyone has packed up their microphones and moved on to next weekend’s race in Saudi Arabia gives this mess another week of legs. If you didn’t know better, you’d think this was a scripted show.
That’s the key to Formula One′s sudden rise to the fore – it kind of is. Nobody’s writing it down, but people know what they should say.
Formula One isn’t really about cars in the same way sports is no longer about sports. In the current media environment, both things are about content.
You can’t count on the competition to be absorbing all of the time. In the case of Formula One, it’s not absorbing at all. The only reason to watch the races is if you get charged up by being screamed at by men with posh English accents.
But the content need have nothing to do with the contest. Hence Drive to Survive. Hence all the public friction that constantly roils Formula One teams. Hence the teen-dream lifestyles of the drivers. Hence the churn of highly curated social-media material they are all producing all of the time.
Car racing was uniquely poised for the TikTok age because its participants have always been performers. From the earliest days, they had to be to attract sponsorship. Now they put on the same act for the whole world on the internet.
Natural performers understand conflict is the key to good drama. So unlike their peers in other, less-alluring sports, they don’t wait for it to happen. They create it.
This is not to say that Horner did what he did for the sake of the show. Just that once he did it, other actors in the play were going to use it to inform their own roles.
It is a virtuous and vicious cycle, depending on your perspective. It’s certainly good for Formula 1. This season’s Netflix offering will be Coronation Street with private jets. Every league in the world would pay for that sort of publicity if they could, but they can’t buy it. They don’t have the acting talent.
Only a few days old, this year’s Formula One season is probably over already. Here’s a tip you can take to the bookies – Verstappen wins.
But the Verstappen-Horner family feud? You’ll have to tune in weekly to see how poor Geri handles that one.
