Zak Brown said he would welcome christian horner back into Formula 1 with open arms, saying he would be surprised if the former Red Bull boss was not back in the sport after his departure last July. Horner, who has said he has "unfinished business" in Formula 1, can return in June under the terms of his settlement with Red Bull.
Brown, the McLaren chief executive, was unusually warm about a longtime rival whose presence has defined much of the modern F1 paddock. "I think Christian was a great personality for the sport," he said. "He's a great operator." Brown added that he would be "shocked if he wasn't back in the sport, whether it was with Alpine or someone else," before joking: "I'd rather have 10 weak team principals, but that's not going to happen anytime soon."
The comments land as Horner is part of a consortium looking to buy Otro Capital's 24% share in Alpine's F1 team, with Mercedes also revealed to be exploring its own purchase of the stake. If successful, the move would pull Horner back into the sport from a different angle, even as he remains outside the paddock for now. Red Bull has owned its senior team and Racing Bulls outright since 2006, and there is no other case of an F1 team owning a minority share in another team, which has made the Alpine talks especially closely watched.
Brown's tone also sharpened the contrast with Toto Wolff, who said as recently as last month that he was in two minds about Horner returning and said Horner had left "a lot of broken glass" across his two decades in charge of Red Bull. Brown has been the most outspoken critic of A/B team set-ups, and his position has not shifted: "It hasn't changed at all. I think I've been consistent," he said. Ferrari's close technical partnership with Haas, introduced in 2016, was widely controversial at the time, and the debate over how tightly teams can work together has never really gone away.
Horner's next move now looks more like a matter of when than if. If Alpine goes ahead with a sale, or if another team comes calling, the sport may soon find out whether one of its most combative figures returns as a team boss, an investor or something else entirely.
