A random snake is the last thing Formula One needs right now. But Zak Brown, the McLaren boss, waves me over and urges me to take a seat. I hope for some high-level gossip as he sips his bright blue energy drink. I pull out the chair, and where I would have sat lies – coiled up, tongue out – a spineless, carnivorous reptile.
Thankfully, it was a fake – a joke snake, a welcome levity, and an import that required Brown to offer an explanation at airport security for its introduction into the country. And next day the plastic impersonator was destined for driver Lando Norris’ helmet. For giggles.
‘Who would you most like to have that snake poison,’ I wondered aloud.
‘Where do you start?’ laughed Brown, the 52-year-old American who is attempting to steer Britain’s most successful Formula One team back to the heights.
Just a vignette in a sunny autumnal Melbourne paddock amid scorched grass ahead of tomorrow’s Australian Grand Prix.
Red Bull have been rocked by allegations of inappropriate behaviour and sexual messaging from team principal Christian Horner by a female employee in recent months
Horner – who is the husband of former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell – was cleared of any wrongdoing last month following an internal inquiry
Everything else in Formula One, though, has been real forked-tongue vengeance these past few weeks. It is by tradition a sport beset by – or indeed set alight by – scandal over the years, but arguably never on so many fronts as in 2024.
The most volatile public debacle, the one that has exhausted more column inches than any other, is playing out at Red Bull. Christian Horner, 50-year-old team principal and husband of former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, has been accused of harassing a female employee.
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An internal inquiry cleared him of wrongdoing last month. The complainant is now appealing that verdict.
She – and whoever is funding her – is paying legal fees running into hundreds of thousands of pounds to Goodwin Procter, a global law firm with headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts, having parted from her previous lawyers, UK-based Lewis Silkin.
The employee is suspended from work at Red Bull’s factory in Milton Keynes on full pay – something like £65,000 a year. Yet she has also hired a spin doctor, Giles Kenningham, a former head of press at 10 Downing Street and spokesman for David – now Lord – Cameron.
Kenningham was awarded an MBE for political and public service in Cameron’s 2016 resignation honours. He has since set up his own PR agency, Trafalgar Strategy, self-styled ‘as a strategic communications consultancy, specialising in public affairs, crisis comms and reputation management’. Presumably, Kenningham’s services don’t come cheap. ‘£15,000 to £20,000 a month,’ estimated one Formula One insider.
The strong feeling is that, regardless of the issue at hand, forces within Red Bull want Horner out as part of an internal power struggle. (Follow the money.)
On a second front, Mohammed Ben Sulayem, the 62-year-old FIA president, a former champion rally driver from Dubai, was accused of influencing the result of the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix last year, allegedly asking the stewards to restore Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso to the podium; and of needlessly urging the withholding of a safety certificate for the inaugural race on the Las Vegas Strip in October.
The event went ahead anyway because Ben Sulayem did grant his permission (so this was, to say the least, a strange accusation). He was exonerated by his own organisation’s ethics committee this week on both counts.
Mohammed Ben Sulayem was accused of influencing last year’s Saudi Arabian GP result
He was accused of asking stewards to restore Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso to the podium
On a third front, Susie Wolff, the 41-year-old wife of Mercedes boss Toto Wolff, has begun legal proceedings against the FIA for investigating whether she, and her husband, were guilty of a conflict of interest. She is head of F1 Academy, the women-only series run by Formula One’s owners, the American conglomerate Liberty Media, operating in this sphere as Formula One Management (FOM).
The issue was looked into at the end of last year by the FIA compliance department and speedily dismissed. The FIA acknowledged that FOM had robust procedures in place to guard against the allegation that rival teams believed she had made Toto aware of privileged FOM information.
Susie’s legal case, which has the potential to see someone jailed, began on March 4, but news of it only broke this week, when she issued a social media tweet detailing her action – within minutes of Ben Sulayem being cleared.
Toto Wolff does not see eye-to-eye with Ben Sulayem. This emanates from the fallout surrounding Lewis Hamilton missing out on the world championship through the withdrawal of the safety car on the final lap at Abu Dhabi in 2021 and Max Verstappen pouncing on the seven-time world champion in the final shootout to clinch the title.
Ben Sulayem took over from Jean Todt as president of the governing body weeks after the controversy, and, after a period of consideration longer than Wolff liked, and with a heavy heart, he dismissed his race director Michael Masi, whose recall of the safety car was so crucial to the outcome. Rancour between Wolff and Ben Sulayem has existed from that moment, just as FOM resent the Emirati’s power, too.
None of this intrigue is new to Formula One. It is a pattern as old as sin. I well remember the ‘Spygate’ scandal of 2007, when secret Ferrari information was imported into McLaren.
The British team were fined $100million for their transgression. On the face of it, it was simple: McLaren possessed 780 pages of Ferrari technical nuggets, but other factors counted for a lot.
Mercedes chief Toto Wolff does not see eye-to-eye with Ben Sulayem – after Lewis Hamilton missed out on the world championship through the withdrawal of the safety car in 2021
Hamilton (R) has insisted that his 2021 title loss to Max Verstappen (L) was ‘manipulated’
Yes, McLaren were likely aided by this transfer of information. It was Hamilton’s debut season, a turbulent one because he was driving alongside Fernando Alonso, then the double and reigning world champion.
Alonso, through his links to those involved, knew more about the 780 pages than Lewis. No doubt. However, if the team were helped by the information so was Hamilton. Yet neither man was penalised by a subtraction of points in the drivers’ standings. McLaren were thrown out of the constructors’ championship and hit with that fine – the biggest in sporting history.
But other reasons pertained. Max Mosley, then president of the FIA, couldn’t stand Ron Dennis, Brown’s predecessor but one as McLaren boss. Mosley did not want Dennis knighted (a recognition that belatedly came in the last New Year Honours’ list, aged 76, albeit for services to charity and industry rather than for his most obvious achievement of winning more world championships – 17 – than any other team principal in history).
Mosley was an extraordinary intellect – a linguist, physicist and lawyer – and troubled heir to his father Sir Oswald Mosley, the fascist Blackshirts leader of the 1930s, whose rebarbative politics he never forswore.
Nor did Max’s mother, Diana, disown those views. She was said to be the most stunning of the six Mitford sisters, the socialites who transfixed society in that different age. One spellbindingly literary obituary, in the Daily Telegraph, hailed her beauty as chiming through a room like a peel of bells.
Anyway, Mosley was from a minor aristocratic background. Dennis was working-class Woking, his success in life an utter triumph and self-engineered, having started out in Formula One as a teenage mechanic on Jochen Rindt’s Cooper.
Lewis Hamilton’s debut season was marred by ‘Spygate’ – where McLaren were caught in possession of 780 pages of Ferrari’s technical nuggets
Mosley once told me that he had no animus against Dennis. It was a total lie, I think.
Dennis, for his part, alluded one day to Mosley’s exposure in the News of the World for taking part in an S&M, Nazi-themed, orgy. Mosley went to court and had the lawyers excise the Nazi bit. He spent the rest of his life campaigning against the free press. He once asked if I could arrange a meal with the editor of this paper to expostulate on the subject of newspaper regulation. It was a request a ball I left outside the off-stump. Dennis said: ‘Do you think Max can only be a masochist in his private life? It’s not possible.’
Bernie Ecclestone, Mosley’s great mate and architect of modern Formula One, uttered the immortal line about Dennis trying to cover up the ‘spying’: ‘It was five million pounds for the crime; £95m for Ron being a c***.’
All these years on, I can’t beat that. But before returning to the present problems, two recollections which demonstrate that scandal is not new in Formula One, as if the point needed underling. I’ll never forget the then seemingly unremarkable night I was at the Novotel, Clarke Quay, Singapore.
On the barstool, on the left, the highly respected Pat Symonds of Renault, the team’s top engineer by designation and repute, was ruminating on what only a few hours later was to become the most disgraceful heist in Formula One history: ‘Crashgate’.
Ron Dennis – former CEO of McLaren – was at the heart of the ‘Spygate’ scandal of 2007
He sipped a beer.
It was a night race, the sport’s first in 2008, and we were all staying on European time. So supper at 3am or whatever. Wake at, say, 3pm.
Anyway 16 hours or so after Symonds had been in that tiny little bar, sitting like a Buddha among acolytes, Nelson Piquet Jnr, son of the triple world champion of the same name, fulfilled Symonds’ instruction to crash to bring out a safety car that would manipulate the situation so star driver Alonso might win. Alonso did win.
Nobody knew could prove it was fishy for ages. Some suspected skulduggery, but not many.
The following year, the scandal was exposed. Flavio Briatore, the Renault supremo, and Symonds, were banned from the sport indefinitely, sine die expulsions, overturned by the French courts. Symonds now works for FOM as chief technical officer. Briatore, still Alonso’s manager, is an ambassador for FOM. Alonso was exonerated.
As for Mosley, he went from his post as FIA president in October 2009, despite having won a vote of approval from his international membership after the orgy scandal.
Mosley’s office was high up, a balcony view, at Place de la Concorde in Paris, where so many heads rolled during the French Revolution. Next door, where Max stayed, was Hotel de Crillon. Marie Antoinette learned to play the piano there.
The day he announced his exit, I shared a few minutes upstairs with him in his office. He was aloof and charming and erudite; he always was all those things. One other journalist, one PR, Luca di Montezemolo, the Ferrari president, and Ecclestone, and nobody else. I half feared Max would chuck himself off the roof. He was a strong and defiant man, though.
In 2008, Nelson Piquet Jnr fulfilled instruction to crash and bring out a safety car that would manipulate the situation so star driver Fernando Alonso might win the Singapore GP
Yet, or because of that, in May 2021, aged 81 and dying of cancer, he blew his brains out at home in Chelsea. His aunt, Unity, who was infatuated with Adolf Hitler, had attempted the same exit strategy. She misfired, and struggled on, incapacitated, with a bullet in her head before finally dying of meningitis in 1948.
Max went for dinner with his estranged wife, Jean, the night before his suicide. He left a note on his door: ‘Do not enter. Call the police.’
The whole show of Formula One in all its dimensions, sometimes harrowing, captivates people. Perhaps we should be thankful for the distraction when Verstappen – as one of the great sportsmen of all time, and I’d watch him for fun forever – is romping to a fourth consecutive world title – a near-certainty going into the third race coming of 24-race season. (Though Ferrari have looked strong here ahead of qualifying at a time this morning, when all but the fanatics will be asleep.)
A record crowd for Friday practice, a claimed 124,113, came to Melbourne’s Albert Park yesterday, which perhaps goes a little way to prove that madness sells, or at least that it doesn’t kill the golden goose.
