IT was an anonymous email sent and designed for maximum impact.
It landed in my inbox almost 24 hours a minute since Christian Horner was cleared of any wrongdoing following Red Bull’s internal investigation.
Other names included Liberty Media chief Greg Maffei, who owns the rights to F1. The FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem and F1 CEO Stefano Dominacali.
For good measure, the F1 team bosses were also included. Just like Max Verstappen’s father, Jos.
It was from an anonymous sender, the title was simply the date: ‘Feb Twenty Nine’.
Inside was a Google Drive link with 79 files claiming to be evidence of the independent investigation.
There’s no way of knowing if they were real or fake, but either way it sent shockwaves through the F1 paddock before this season had even started.
Horner was sitting on the team’s pit wall during the second practice session in Bahrain when the email dropped.
After the session, he walked out of the team garage and went to the catering unit where he was staying when the nuclear fallout began.
He had survived the outcome of the internal investigation into improper conduct following a complaint from a female colleague.
One wonders if he will survive this time after this very public humiliation – again, regardless of whether they were indeed real or fake.
Just hours earlier, McLaren CEO Zak Brown and Mercedes boss Toto Wolff had appealed to the sport’s governing body, the FIA, demanding transparency.
“I just read the statement, which was quite simple,” Wolff said. “My personal opinion is that we can’t really see behind the curtain.
“There’s a lady in an organization who spoke to HR and said there was an issue and it was looked into and yesterday the sport got the message that it’s all fine, we’ve looked into it.
“I believe that as we strive to be a global sport, on such crucial topics, there needs to be more transparency and I wonder what the position of the sport is?
“We are competitors, we are a team and we can have our own personal opinion or not. But it is more of a general reaction or action that we have to judge as a sport, what is right in that situation and what is wrong.” .
“Are we talking with the right moral approach, with the values based on the speculation that is out there? As a sport, we cannot afford to leave things vague and opaque on critical topics like this because it will take us by surprise. ” “
Brown added: “It is ultimately the responsibility of the organizers of Formula 1, the owners of Formula 1, to ensure that all racing teams and staff, drivers and everyone else involved in the sport operate in a way which we all live by.
“I don’t think it’s the roles and responsibilities of the teams. That’s for the FIA and Formula 1 to ultimately decide and ask for what they think will give them the level of transparency they need to ultimately reach their conclusion and we just have to count on them to fulfill that obligation to all of us.”
The emailed dossier will only increase that pressure in the form of scrutiny of Horner – who has always denied the allegations.
It also puts Red Bull in a difficult position.
Should the emailed file be legitimate and contain elements of the original report, which was thoroughly investigated and presented by the independent QC, then this is certainly nothing new to them and their decision to remain with their team leader remains.
If they were to make an about-face now, now that they’ve gone public, there could potentially be criticism that they planned to keep their report private to save face.
Whatever the outcome, it’s a mess for the world champions.
Reports of a wedge between Horner and Verstappen’s father have increased in recent weeks.
So it was interesting that Jos Verstappen was in the paddock wearing a team jacket and seemed unmoved by the chaos happening around him.