So that went well, Formula One-wise. A week of screaming hysteria; drivers threatening to “explode”. People scouring Christian Horner’s eye-watering sexts to a woman who wasn’t his wife, while his wife — poor Ginger Spice — trogged dutifully out to Bahrain in $1,000 Louboutins to support him, for the world’s most embarrassing photo op.
Horner — or “Whinger Spice” as he’s often called in F1 for his “endless complaining” — later sat, wary, taut, eyes flashing like a mongoose, at a press conference in Saudi Arabia, talking about “tension” and “leakage”, and for once he didn’t mean the cars.
Things had been intrusive and “very trying” for him and “particularly my family”, he mooed. “I’m the only one who’s been named in this.”
I’m sorry, but trying for him? So far I have counted — in just 125 words — two people who’ve suffered, and I don’t think either is Christian Horner.
What is going on in this bizarre sex scandal? It is one of the most cagey and peculiar stories I’ve covered. On the one hand it feels like a standard “twat slips up” entertainment story: a rich control freak with anxieties about private jets gloms onto a sexy, submissive blonde; then she turns on him, he tries to crush her, she fights back etc, against a shimmering backdrop of fast cars, pop star wives, expensive hotels, jets, champagne and outfits that, as one recent article memorably put it, are “worth more than the market price of all the organs in my body”.
On the other hand it feels a bit more important/unpleasant than that.
Take the way this woman — an ordinary British girl working at Red Bull — has been treated. Attractive, posh: she’s a graduate of Edinburgh University. She’s not stupid; she works hard; she gets an internship in a world she loves, only to find — and I’m just hazarding a guess here, it being Formula One — that she’s instantly turned into a sex object and deluged with horny pit stop chat, including the endless tragic messages from Horner.
I have counted—in just 125 words—two people who’ve suffered, and I don’t think either is Christian Horner.
If you read the messages, it’s not the content that’s striking: that’s the usual boring, ovary-shriveling rubbish (next to a picture of a pie: “tomorrows beef pie”) plus a few unforgivable pictures — just what is that gross glistening thing in one of them?
No, it’s the timing, the neediness, the persistence. You can feel your soul being sucked dry. It reminded me of a recent thinly veiled memoir in which a former PA described almost killing herself after trying to respond instantly to her domineering boss while on a treadmill. “Can you reply to all of my emails after you see them?” is what he’d snapped. Meanwhile she’s packed off to hospital, wondering why she was working for a hedge fund so appalling that it specifically employed a woman (not her) in the toilets to flush away the turds the busy male bankers didn’t have time for.
Why do people put up with men like this? It doesn’t even matter that Horner’s married, or that some of the messages are sexual. They’re all of a piece: exhausting, nonstop, draining, unnecessary, me me me. In Formula One the egos are awful. And at the end of it all, most women are too tired/over it/busy to fight, so just leave.
Not this one, though: she filed a complaint.
Cue huge investigation at Red Bull — more ego — many staff involved, everyone interviewed by a KC: “one of the most reputable in the land”, he puffed. And, well, call me cynical, but these don’t feel like the actions of a company that’s immediately up for believing the woman. It makes me wonder: why unload the GDP of a small country on some “independent” not-named KC to get to the bottom of things if you don’t want to machine-gun her into the ground? I mean, just who paid? Of course, Horner was cleared. And that would have uneasily been that, except someone then leaked the messages, and on March 7 the company decided to do what maybe it had wanted to all along: it suspended her.
If there is one thing this story tells us, it is that there are some things petrodollars can’t buy. Two of those things are nous and gut instinct.
No matter how much, deep in its battered reptile brain, Formula One wants better PR — abolishing grid girls, setting up the F1 Academy for young female drivers — it remains a deeply toxic organization. Lewis Hamilton may say that his main aim in life is to help “women” and people with “disabilities”, but what use is that when his industry cannot even handle a PA properly. There are no senior women at Red Bull, and the rest of it is clearly NDA-ed up, from here to Jeddah.
How does Red Bull think suspending a female whistleblower goes down with the general public, in an industry known, historically, for sidelining, mocking and objectifying women? You’d hope private companies aren’t just binning off people whenever they want because they’re saying inconvenient things. Instead of offering “transparency”, it has, of course, simply started questioning her: she was “dishonest” in her evidence. Is it aware that this is what’s said of victims of sexual crime whenever someone wants to discredit them?
Maybe this woman is a fantasist, a liar or whatever else Red Bull wants to fling at her. Maybe some of the texts aren’t real, as some “sources” are claiming: Horner’s WhatsApps begin with a capital letter, we’re told, whereas some of the messages don’t. Truly, this is a Prince Andrew-style defense. None of that matters anyway, but the fact the company simply didn’t know how to deal with her from the start does.
As for Horner, all he’s done has been to obfuscate, citing “confidentiality”, and send out raging legal letters trying to bully and frighten journalists into not reporting what they believe to be true. I wonder what Geri makes of it. It’s hardly girl power, is it?
Camilla Long is a columnist and television critic at The Sunday Times of London