Why Christian Horner banned Mercedes’ name as Red Bull built its own F1 engine

Outubro 14, 2026 lojamais44@gmail.com

Former Red Bull CEO and team principal Christian Horner has revealed why he banned employees of the squad’s powertrains division from using the name of bitter Formula 1 rivals Mercedes.

The Milton Keynes-based outfit had enjoyed a flourishing partnership with Honda following a turbulent end to its time working with Renault power, re-emerging as a title contender in the late 2010s and early 2020s with the Japanese manufacturer and ultimately bringing an end to the dominance enjoyed by Mercedes since the dawn of the V6 turbo-hybrid era in 2014, when Max Verstappen secured his maiden drivers’ world championship in 2021.

But a year earlier, Honda had announced its departure from F1 as an OEM at the end of what would turn out to be the Dutchman’s year of glory – a decision it would renege on to link up with Aston Martin for 2026 – leaving Red Bull seeking a new power provider for 2022 and beyond.

Horner and the rest of the Red Bull hierarchy took the bold option, creating an in-house powertrains department to become its own OEM, taking the fight to established power suppliers Mercedes, Ferrari and Renault – the latter of which has since left the grid.

And while a deal was struck with Honda to continue the partnership between 2022 and 2025 under the RBPT moniker, Red Bull partnered with Ford to start developing the power unit needed to comply with the new-for-2026 regulations from scratch, leading to an aggressive recruitment drive led by Horner.

In an exclusive interview with sister publication Autosport, Horner explained: “We did a deal with Honda, because they were pulling out, that any of their staff in the UK, which were all operational staff and a few battery-related people, came across into the business.

“But we needed to start from scratch. It was a startup.”

Christian Horner

Photo by: Autosport

Despite a migration of staff from the existing business as well as from Honda’s organisation, many gaps still needed filling: “I was interviewing a lot of people from Mercedes, trying to convince them to come across to this crazy new project but using what we had done on the chassis as a prerequisite to say ‘look, we’ve done it on a chassis, we can do it on an engine with the right people’.

“And of course, you’ve got several businesses in the UK – the most prevalent being [Mercedes] HPP, and you’ve got Cosworth and you’ve got Ilmor – but there were no new engine businesses within the UK for the last 25 years.

“So what you had at HPP was a sort of stagnant organisation that people were almost waiting for dead men’s shoes to be able to progress.

“So by saying we’re going to put this in the UK – which was a fundamental decision because there was a discussion of ‘do we partner with AVL and do it in Austria’, base it at the circuit in the Red Bull Ring or whatever – but having convinced the shareholders that we need to be in the UK, identifying we had the space within the campus in a building that used to be a bubblewrap factory that we were able to do a ‘minor update’ to, as far as the planners were aware, which involved taking everything down apart from one steel, and build a new factory within 55 weeks and start recruiting the right people.”

The ‘right people’ included the poaching of a number of key members from Mercedes, led by Toto Wolff. Horner and Wolff had a number of vitriolic tête-à-têtes with each other while Verstappen duked it out with Lewis Hamilton for the drivers’ title, with that rivalry carrying through to Red Bull’s dominance in the early years of F1’s ground-effect era.

“That [the recruitment] was a process where we were getting into a tug of love over talent, and I was aggressively recruiting – Ben Hodgkinson [RBPT technical director, formerly Mercedes HPP senior power unit engineer] was a key recruitment in the early days, Pip Clode [RBPT head of mechanical design for energy recovery, formerly Mercedes HPP F1 power unit concept team leader] on the turbo coming across, Phil Prew [RBPT engineering director, formerly Mercedes HPP chief engineer] coming across. There were so many talented people we managed to attract out of HPP.

“And then, of course, giving people the opportunity from within the business that perhaps wanted to make that step into other parts of the organisation, so it gave an opportunity for talent to try something different.

Ben Hodgkinson, Red Bull Powertrains Technical Director

Photo by: Mark Thompson / Getty Images

“You had departments that were going to be affected by both, so for example, electronics had to grow overnight to accommodate both chassis and engine and hadn’t produced engine wiring looms before. So it was a really dynamic period.

“We employed some really great characters, like Steve Brodie [RBPT leader of combustion engine operations] from Mercedes [where he was HPP F1 trackside and final inspection manager], and they just came with such energy and passion for the project, it was a really exciting time. There were a lot of questions, even internally, because Honda had produced an engine that was giving us the ability to fight for world championships toe-to-toe with Mercedes.”

But with that influx of personnel and knowledge came talk of ‘what we used to do’, something that Horner was keen to stamp out.

“There was a tremendous atmosphere within the organisation of getting this entity going and, of course, you’re welcoming people from the opposition, the enemy.

“So there was too much talk of ‘well, at Mercedes we did this and at Mercedes we did that,’ so in the end it got banned from meetings – we aren’t going to mention Mercedes; it became ‘Team B’.”

You can watch ‘The Autosport Interview’ with Christian Horner in its entirety here.