The real scandal in Formula 1 is its attitude toward women (2024)

The line between spectacle and sport has always been blurry. But when it comes to Formula 1 — the global motorsport with some of the fastest cars and deepest pockets — the biggest institutional players seem to forget that there’s a difference between delicious drama and legitimate controversy.

It’s easy to mistake the two when so much of the elite sport’s success can be attributed to Drive to Survive, the addictive Netflix show that explains the intimidating technicalities and stakes of F1 through the catty interpersonal drama between teammates and competitors alike. My colleague Byrd Pinkerton described the show in 2021 this way: “Basically, imagine the Real Housewives, if the housewives were driving around at 300 kilometers an hour, and if occasionally one of the housewives caught on fire.”

As a result, F1 has experienced years of explosive growth, especially in the US. More eyes has meant more races: You might have heard Las Vegas residents griping about the construction inconveniences and inaccessibility of last November’s brand new street race. Or how Elon Musk, Shakira, and Vin Diesel rolled out to the Miami Grand Prix. There’s also the sheer stardom of the drivers: thirst traps of Lewis Hamilton going viral, Daniel Ricciardo gracing the cover of GQ, and endless brand deals for nearly everyone on the grid. (That’s where the 20 drivers start the race!)

Right now, though, a controversy might change how people see the ordinarily glitzy sport — especially the growing female fanbase F1 is all too happy to court via social media. In 2022, approximately 40 percent of fans were female, up 8 percent from five years ago, according to Stefano Domenicali, CEO of the Formula 1 Group.

In early February, energy drink company and team owner Red Bull launched an independent investigation into its Formula 1 team principal, Christian Horner, for potential misconduct toward a team member. Red Bull did not specify the details of the nature of the alleged misconduct nor who it was against, leading to rumors. Horner, who manages team strategy and personnel, was cleared a few days ahead of the start of the season.

A day after Red Bull dismissed the investigation, a Google Drive folder was anonymously sent to more than 100 reporters, other team principals, and members of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), the governing body for the sport. The folder contains nearly 80 different files, most of which are screenshots of WhatsApp messages between what is allegedly Horner and a female employee.

Vox is currently in the process of verifying the images and videos. What we can say is that the undated messages include references to intimate acts, requests to delete messages, and what appears to be a nude picture. These WhatsApp messages share space with seemingly professional communication, including about whether this person could work from home.

Red Bull Racing, its parent company Red Bull GmbH, and Christian Horner did not respond to Vox’s requests for comment about the validity of the messages, the nature of the investigation, anything regarding potentially firing Horner, or whether they have opened any new investigations by time of publication.

While controversy isn’t new to F1 — just look at the cheating scandals, race interference, or the driver who lost his seat because his Russian oligarch father was sanctioned at the beginning of the war in Ukraine — the noise surrounding Horner should be more than fodder for a juicy season of Drive to Survive. It should prompt questions around how to best support the women pit crew members, engineers, assistants, and all other workers in a predominantly male sport. If F1 can’t protect its own female employees in the sport, then the efforts to create a pipeline for female drivers as well as make races safer for the recent influx of female fans will fall flat.

Currently, much of the coverage of the controversy is focused on whether Red Bull will be able to maintain its enormous lead in the Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championships, or speculation about the other person’s identity and motivations in the texts, as if this is gossip fodder about reality stars and not a workplace concern. As of Thursday morning, Red Bull had reportedly suspended a woman who accused Horner of inappropriate behavior. It’s not clear if she is the same person in the texts. And on Friday afternoon, it was reported that Red Bull adviser Helmut Marko could face suspension.

The way everything is shaking out feels more like gossip, rather than a gut check to see if the sport’s institutions are capable of questioning breaches of power. From the FIA to the individual teams and their owners, the sport has proven time and time again that they hide behind claims that everything should “just be about the racing,” rather than having to concern themselves with the people who make it possible. How Formula 1 decides to move from here will determine if their efforts to support women employees and its fans have any merit.

The investigation and allegations against Christian Horner, explained

Most Formula 1 fans would say the sport is pretty boring at the moment: Red Bull driver Max Verstappen, predictably, will take first position in most races. He’s in a league of his own. The engineers and leadership at Red Bull Racing guarantee that.

When you’re constantly crushing the competition, others try to find ways to take you down. There are several instances documented in Drive to Survive of petty reports to the FIA. So when Red Bull announced on February 5 that it would be looking into “certain allegations” made against team principal Christian Horner, it was hard to pin down whether this was an external attempt to get him fired for competition’s sake or if there was veracity to the claims of misconduct. Red Bull’s intentionally vague statement to the media ushered in rumors about “aggressive management.” Of what kind? The company never explicitly said. And it still won’t.

“One of the biggest quotes from Drive to Survive is [motorsport commentator] Will Buxton always saying ‘In F1, when there’s smoke, there’s usually fire,’” said Kate Byrne, one of the founders of the fan community Two Girls 1 Formula. She explains that such internal matters rarely bubble up to the public, but she feels Red Bull weighing in was a red flag, saying it’s possible they wanted to “get in front of it by saying something. Red Bull will never do that on their own.”

Red Bull’s outside lawyer, who they refuse to publicly name, cleared Horner of any wrongdoing on February 28 — just ahead of the first Grand Prix of the season in Bahrain. “Red Bull is confident that the investigation has been fair, rigorous, and impartial,” Red Bull’s parent company said in another statement. “The investigation report is confidential and contains the private information of the parties and third parties who assisted in the investigation, and therefore we will not be commenting further out of respect for all concerned.”

Additionally, according to some reports, Red Bull was preparing to fire Horner as early as February 2 — three days before the investigation announcement — but he had allegedly insisted on arbitration. Horner has not made any statements regarding potentially being fired, and during this week’s press conference, he declined to give any more specifics.

“My wife has been phenomenally supportive, as has my family, but the intrusion on my family is now enough,” Horner said during a press conference Thursday in Saudi Arabia. “It is time now to focus on why we are here, which is to go Formula 1 racing.”

Who gets to control the narrative?

Horner’s career will likely be unaffected, given the portrayal of this investigation as simply a scandal rather than a potential workplace misconduct issue. F1 and Red Bull are certainly ensuring that Horner is able to do “business as normal.” So naturally, all eyes were on Red Bull’s two drivers, Max Verstappen and Checo Perez, to scope out their performance last weekend. There were concerns, some raised by Max’s father Jos, who is a former racer, that things at Red Bull might “explode” if nothing is done. If it’s true that tensions were rising within the team, it would be evident in the first race, no?

As if. Verstappen led the race by a wide margin of about 20 seconds between him and his teammate. Simply put, he was coasting, taking his monster of a car for a joy ride, while no competitors even came close. It was like watching Simone Biles on a playground. After Verstappen snagged first place, Horner was right in front of the podium with his wife, former Spice Girl Gerri Halliwell, and the heir of the Red Bull fortune, Chalerm Yoovidhya. “Better to do your talking on the track,” Horner said after the race.

Clive Rose/Getty Images

Focus on the continued dominance of the Red Bull team misses the point, however. Verstappen will continue to perform just fine regardless of tensions, but there are hundreds of women who work for F1 teams who, because of F1’s general mishandling of this whole situation, are being tacitly told that their experiences and safety within the sport don’t matter. If they speak up, they may be ridiculed — all because of the obsessive focus on winning races and ratings.

And yet, the FIA and Red Bull have made no statements or promises about how they’re going to support women (and nonbinary and trans) workers in light of the conversation around Horner. Even the whispers of such behavior should launch wider investigations across teams, set up a stronger whistleblower policy, and add more concrete consequences for senior leadership who do end up embarking on romantic relationships with employees without clearing it with the appropriate bodies. The FIA has not responded to a request for comment on whether they have started an investigation into Horner and Red Bull by the time of this publication.

But given how each F1 team has its own CEO and operates in several different countries, internal protocols and processes vary, according to Nicole Sievers, co-founder of Two Girls 1 Formula.

“In a sport that’s so heavily male dominated, there are also likely pressures on women that are working for these teams,” Sievers said. “That’s a really tough position to be in, especially when you do see kind of the overwhelming majority of the ruling class of F1. We’ve seen that play out historically. Money just breeds power, which breeds a loss of a feeling of consequence.”

On top of that, so much of the makeup of the current media pool skews a certain way: older, male, white. This old guard has been covering F1 for a very long time. Coverage around sexism, racism, and other types of discrimination may not be top of mind.

Strict rules on F1 coverage don’t help. Typically in American sports, getting press accreditation is fairly routine, but with F1, there are very strict rules for who is eligible and what you can produce, from prohibiting moving images to not providing credentials to websites that don’t meet certain traffic figures on their F1 coverage, with relatively small-scale offenses resulting in extended bans.

When there’s such a tight leash on reporters, asking hard questions with an eye for accountability becomes difficult. As Lily Herman, author of the F1 culture newsletter Engine Failure, explains, “There are all these fears that exist in F1 around, ‘Hey, if I speak up, I’m going to get my media access revoked or my entire media organization will if I do something wrong.’”

A perfect case study of this dynamic can be seen with Road & Track’s editor-in-chief Daniel Pund taking down a critical piece by Kate Wagner analyzing the opulence of Formula 1 because he felt it was the “wrong story” for the publication. The story itself was entertaining, but not necessarily news-breaking, and the removal raised questions about whether the FIA reached out (according to Pund, they haven’t).

What does this mean for women in motorsport

How this story ultimately unfolds will demonstrate if F1 understands its changing fanbase and what it takes to make its employees feel supported, and whether it can get with the times.

“As someone who loves the sport, it’s definitely disappointing to see what’s going on right now,” said Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes driver and seven-time world champion, during media day for this weekend’s race in Saudi Arabia. “It doesn’t look good to the outside world. It doesn’t look good from the inside either. It’s a really pivotal moment for the sport, in terms of what we project to the world and how it’s handled.”

By sweeping such allegations under the rug, Red Bull may hope the various dramas of the sport will cause the news to die out. That’s wrong. If anything, F1’s growing female fanbase is hungry for accountability.

“We need to firmly stake our chair to the ground at the table and say: ‘We’re not leaving and we’re going to force you to be better,’” Byrne said. To her, what employees face mirrors the experiences of fans. You can’t improve one without the other, and turning off the sport won’t help, she added. “The only way you can do that is not by stopping, but by continuing to go on and being louder about it.”

And we’ve seen fans demand equal pay for female workers, safety protections for all fans regardless of gender identity at races, and increasing opportunities for female drivers through F1 Academy. The sport, of course, made promises that it will do better in these avenues. Talk is just talk though, if there aren’t actions to back it up when the stakes have never been higher. (F1 Academy, for instance, was criticized for not being broadcasted during its debut in 2023.)

“I always question very openly what exactly the point of all of this is,” Herman said, “It’s great that women are getting opportunities like F1 Academy. But we should always kind of question what exactly those opportunities are, what they do, and who they don’t extend to. What’s just kind of lip service being paid in the moment of crisis?”

At the end of the day, we’re talking about people’s lives, not just some reality TV show. When winning is prioritized over well-being, we all lose.