Christian Horner's memoir, Drive, begins with the contentious 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix - a Formula 1 race that many still find divisive to this day. For the first time, the Briton revealed that he deliberately put pressure on Michael Masi to restart the race after Nicholas Latifi crashed his Williams, causing a safety car.
Red Bull's Max Verstappen and then-Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton entered the last race of the 2021 season on even points. And in the final laps of the race, Hamilton was ahead, but a freshly pitted Verstappen had new rubber with just five lapped cars between them as they drove the circuit behind the safety car. Overtaking all five cars would be a tough ask for the young Dutchman.
“My heart sank,” Horner wrote. “That meant that Max would have to pass all five cars before getting to Lewis, which was impossible in one racing lap.
“I decided to apply some more pressure on race control. ‘Come on, Michael, we need to get this race going; why aren’t we getting these lapped cars out the way?’”
Masi, in what became a highly controversial move, unlapped only the cars between the pair and restarted the race with just one lap left. This move ultimately gave Verstappen the championship win with him able to easily dispatch Hamilton on his new tyres. Masi was replaced for the 2022 season.
Horner explained on the High Performance Podcast that he only realised that year, once radio messages to the race director began to be broadcast, that Toto Wolff had been speaking directly to Masi.
“Hang on, that’s not on? You’re putting pressure on the referee here,” Horner said. “So I was like to our team manager, ‘Get me on the line’, because I never spoke to Charlie Whiting in 15 years that he was there.”
He insisted Red Bull had done nothing wrong at the end.
“He made the decision, which was within his remit, as per the regulations to be able to do, but it had never been done before, to allow the cars between Max and Lewis to unlap,” Horner said. “It wasn’t our fault but we’re in a position where we’ve got this one lap to have a crack at it, and if anyone is going to deliver you on a lap like that, it’s Max. What happened, happened.”