Christian Horner’s memoir, Drive, offers a detailed account of his Formula One career but says little about the allegations involving a female Red Bull employee that preceded his departure from the team in 2025.
The former Red Bull principal also gives only a limited account of his marriage to Geri Halliwell, despite the intense public scrutiny surrounding their relationship after Horner was accused of sending coercive and suggestive messages. He has always denied the allegations.
In the book, Horner dismisses the controversy in a few lines. He recalls telling Halliwell about the accusations in a chapter titled Out Come The Wolves.
“She fell silent as she listened,” he writes. “We both understood the implications immediately. She looked at me. ‘Just tell me your truth,’ she said.”
The account does not explain the nature of the claims or the impact they had on Red Bull and the wider Formula One paddock.
Red Bull said in early 2024 that an investigation had cleared Horner. Within 24 hours, however, an anonymous email account circulated hundreds of messages allegedly exchanged between him and the employee to journalists, drivers and senior figures in Formula One.
The messages appeared to show Horner sending inappropriate texts, including requests for photographs and comments about the woman’s clothing. The material was distributed as the new season was about to begin.
Horner writes that Halliwell learned of the mass email while travelling to Bahrain for the first race of the year. He says the couple then “walked hand in hand into the paddock as a media scrum jostled around us”.
Halliwell briefly used her unmarried name, Geri Halliwell, on social media before the couple continued to present a united front in public.
In Drive, Horner portrays her as a supportive presence who encouraged him when he faced hostility at a Formula One launch in London.
“It doesn’t matter if they boo,” he recalls her telling him. “Booing means they care. It’s only a problem when they ignore you.”
Christian Horner memoir focuses on Formula One career
Halliwell appears more fully in the book only after several chapters covering racing regulations, business deals and disputes. Horner says they first met at the 2010 Monaco Grand Prix, where she attended with her then boyfriend.
He recalls that she was familiar with motor racing because her father had been a car dealer and had taken her to banger racing as a child. Their relationship developed later, after Horner says his previous relationship with Beverley Allen, the mother of his daughter Olivia, had become “more of a loving friendship”.
The memoir is dominated by Horner’s rise through motorsport. He describes starting the Arden Formula 3000 team in his twenties, financed partly by his father, and falling into heavy debt while trying to keep the operation running.
He went on to become Red Bull’s team principal at the age of 31, after the company bought the Jaguar Formula One team. Under his leadership, Red Bull won 124 grands prix, eight drivers’ championships and six constructors’ titles.
Horner uses the book to revisit disagreements with figures including Lewis Hamilton, Bernie Ecclestone and Adrian Newey. A joke by Hamilton describing Red Bull as “just a drinks company” is mentioned early in the memoir and revisited later.
Ecclestone features in some of the more colourful recollections, including visits to furniture auctions and his habit of buying items because they were bargains. Horner quotes the former Formula One chief telling him: “If you’re prepared to point the gun, be prepared to pull the trigger.”
But the unresolved questions around the allegations and their consequences remain largely unexplored. The result is a memoir rich in racing statistics and personal disputes, but notably restrained on the controversy that placed Horner’s private life and leadership of Red Bull under the closest scrutiny.
