The Mercedes Team Principal recalls the events of Abu Dhabi 2021 and comments on his former Red Bull rival’s personality.
The new Red Bull
The 2026 season will be a unique chapter for Red Bull, which will enter the championship with several changes. For the first time in four consecutive years, Max Verstappen will compete without holding the world championship title, and he will have a new teammate in Isack Hadjar. The Milton Keynes team will also begin a technical partnership with Ford, all amid the absence of Helmut Marko, who stepped down after twenty years as a consultant. Other departures had already taken place in 2025, including Adrian Newey and Christian Horner, the latter dismissed mid-season and replaced by Laurent Mekies as Team Principal.
Abu Dhabi 2021
Horner’s long tenure at Red Bull also concluded with eight Drivers’ Championship victories, including Max Verstappen’s first career title in 2021. That victory became historic due to the controversial final laps, where Lewis Hamilton lost the chance to claim his eighth championship following decisions made by then-Race Director Michael Masi during the Safety Car restart. Toto Wolff, Mercedes Team Principal, reflected on the incident in an interview with The Telegraph: “Both deserved to become world champions, but the referee made the wrong decision, to use a football analogy, and you can’t go back. The goal was scored, the match is over.”
Horner’s personality
Focusing on what happened at Yas Marina, Wolff shared his view on Christian Horner’s character, particularly regarding whether Horner ever admitted the error: “He was never able to admit it,” Toto Wolff stated. “I try to see it from the other side: from their perspective, they deserved to become world champions, they had experienced some unfair incidents during the season, and the result of that race accurately reflected their performance levels throughout the year. But Christian was never able to admit the same: if it had been the other way around and it happened to them that day, it would have been catastrophic, and he would have unleashed every possible insult. I think the ability to be introspective or to see the other side with some compassion is completely lacking in his personality. It’s the sense of superiority he has, and in the end that hurt him, because he felt entitled to have all the power, and Red Bull did not want to give it to him.”
As the 2026 technical revolution approaches, Toto Wolff’s comments underscore the deep-seated personal and professional friction that defined one of the greatest rivalries in modern sports history, even as the protagonists of that era begin to move on.
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