F1 | Horner: “If I were Wolff I would be worried, he lost 220 engineers”

During the Miami Grand Prix weekend, it emerged that several key members of Red Bull staff, including sporting director Jonathan Wheatley, were the subject of interest from Red Bull’s competitors.

McLaren chief executive Zak Brown said his company has seen “an increase in resumes coming from the team”, suspecting that legendary designer Adrian Newey will not be the last domino to fall. This would be an effect of the “destabilizing” split within Red Bull itself between the Austrian and Thai parts of the company.

However, Team Principal Christian Horner said he was not concerned by the rumors about some of his team members, pointing out that, on the contrary, in recent years the Red Bull Powertrains division has poached over 200 people from Mercedes’ HPP program to build of the Power Units.

“I’m not worried. Of course, there will always be movement between teams,” Horner said.

“I don’t know how many people we or RB have hired from McLaren this year. At Mercedes, we took 220 people away from HPP and into the Red Bull Powertrains program. So when it comes to losing employees, I would be a little more worried. of the 220 who left Mercedes than one or two CVs”.

Horner said it was “inevitable” that Brown and his Mercedes counterpart, Toto Wolff, would spark controversy through the media by exploiting the situation. “I think it’s inevitable. The two candidates involved talk a lot. But I’m not going to get sucked into a back and forth. I would focus more on the problems Toto has,” the Team Principal said.

Red Bull explained that the fact that there are these rumors would be linked to the fact that some members of the team would be out of contract, including Wheatley. It is thought that the sporting director may be interested in becoming team principal should an opportunity open up somewhere, a bit like what happened to Laurent Mekies with Racing Bulls.

Red Bull has recently extended the contracts of several other high-level employees, including head of aerodynamics Enrico Balbo and head of performance engineering Ben Waterhouse, Motorsport.com understands. Furthermore, earlier this year, Red Bull also secured the renewal of Pierre Wache with a long-term deal.