After Christian Horner’s bombshell exit from Red Bull Racing in July after a 20-year tenure as team principal, the topic of his next venture in F1 has been a topic of debate.
Horner netted a sizable figure in his Red Bull severance package, with reports stating that the Austrian constructor must pay the 51-year-old a sum in the region of a ‘high double-digit million-dollar settlement’.
The settlement would greatly help his bid to return to the paddock. Horner would prefer to buy a stake of an F1 team over being employed by them, as a safety net to make sure he wouldn’t be ousted again following his sacking from Red Bull.
Horner has been linked with Alpine since his talents were put back on the market, but current team principal Flavio Briatore has assured fans of the Enstone-based F1 team that he is still ‘committed’ to Alpine despite his age.
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Juan Pablo Montoya theorises about a clause in Christian Horner’s Red Bull exit that won’t see him in the F1 paddock again
Speaking on an episode of MontoyAS, Juan Pablo Montoya hinted at a possible clause which was part of Horner’s Red Bull exit, which means we may not see the former team principal on the pit wall at an F1 Grand Prix in the future.
Speaking to co-host Valentina Pena, Montoya said, “If Christian has the chance, he’ll come back. Whether he wants to or not, we don’t know. With everything that happened and the payout Red Bull must have given him, he’s financially set.
“Maybe part of the deal was that he can’t work in F1 again, that’s the only thing that would stop him. But if I were running a team like Aston Martin, Cadillac, Alpine, Haas, I’d hire him in two seconds.”
Montoya previously called upon Aston Martin to acquire Horner, citing the strong engineering team at the Silverstone-based outfit having everything except a formidable leader with someone of Horner’s calibre.
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Why was Christian Horner sacked from his post as team principal of Red Bull?
Red Bull didn’t specify the exact reason for their sudden sacking of Horner during the 2025 F1 season, but a number of factors have emerged following the news which would have led to the departure of the long-standing team principal.
One of the reasons was due to Horner’s reluctance to delegate control of the commercial side of the team to someone who may have been better equipped to deal with it. The 51-year-old felt that it made more sense for one individual to be responsible for the entire operation within the squad.
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Red Bull also found it difficult to fill vacancies during Horner’s final year, as potential hirees ‘didn’t want to join’ the team due to the ‘chaos’ happening behind-the-scenes at the time. Higher-ups at Red Bull want to make sure something like that never happens again.
Another one of the reasons why they let him go was due to the public spats he would have with other team principals. Red Bull owners felt like Horner was tarnishing the brand by doing so, with his name frequently making headlines in disputes with many other rival bosses at certain points.