Horner Reveals Russell Approach as Antonelli Heads to Austin 102 Points Clear

Christian Horner has revealed that he approached George Russell while running Red Bull, describing the move as a response to Toto Wolff’s long pursuit of Max Verstappen. The admission comes as Formula 1 arrives in Austin for Sunday’s United States Grand Prix, with Russell 102 points behind his Mercedes team-mate Andrea Kimi Antonelli and Wolff reportedly weighing who should eventually replace him. Elsewhere, an early draft of the 2028 regulations restores full-length races, and McLaren brings an upgrade package to Texas with third place in the constructors’ championship at stake.

Horner’s counter-raid on Brackley

According to PlanetF1, Horner says he grew tired of Wolff’s “challenging approach” towards Verstappen and decided to “fight fire with fire” by turning his attention to Russell. Wolff never hid his admiration for Verstappen, and speculation about a move to Mercedes ran for the best part of two seasons. Russell’s own contract renewal was left unresolved deep into 2025 while that saga played out, which gives Horner’s story an obvious logic. If your rival is unsettling your star driver, you unsettle his.

The phrasing matters. “Fight fire with fire” sounds more like a negotiating tactic than a recruitment drive. Driver approaches between top teams are rarely only about signing someone. They create leverage, plant doubt and force a rival principal to spend time and money defending his own line-up. Horner and Wolff spent the better part of a decade conducting their rivalry in public, through the media and the FIA as much as on track, and Horner’s account shows that the driver market was another front in it.

Horner has been in a reflective mood more broadly. Crash.net and Autosport both report that Red Bull’s shareholders phoned him after the Red Bull Ford Powertrains engine took its first Grand Prix victory this season, to thank him for the project. The gesture is deserved. The decision to build engines in Milton Keynes, taken after Honda announced its withdrawal in 2020, was one of the boldest calls any team has made in the hybrid era. A drinks company had never designed a Formula 1 power unit from scratch, and the 2026 rules made the job harder still.

Horner was removed in July 2025 and never saw the engine race under his leadership. Verstappen has now won twice with it, including from pole in Singapore last time out. Whatever the arguments about the end of his tenure, the powertrain may prove his most lasting contribution to the team.

Antonelli’s cushion and the season Russell expected

A former Red Bull chief has told GPfans that Antonelli has “overshadowed” Russell this year, and the numbers make the case without much help. Antonelli has 340 points and eight wins from 17 rounds. Russell has 238 points and three wins. Before the season, the prevailing view was that Mercedes had read the new regulations well and that Russell, entering his prime with a car built around him, was perfectly placed for his first title. Instead, the 20-year-old in the other garage has seized the opportunity.

Singapore summed up the pattern. Antonelli started fourth and finished third. Russell started 19th and recovered to ninth, a creditable drive that still cost him 13 points to his team-mate. Strong Sundays have rarely made up for weaker Saturdays.

What Russell needs from six rounds

With six rounds left, 150 points remain on Grand Prix results alone. To draw level from 102 points behind, Russell would need to outscore Antonelli by 17 points per weekend on average. That is the equivalent of winning every remaining race while Antonelli finishes no higher than sixth each time. The rest of the chasing pack has an even steeper climb:

• Lewis Hamilton (Ferrari): 111 points behind
• Max Verstappen (Red Bull): 119 behind
• Charles Leclerc (Ferrari): 125 behind
• Lando Norris (McLaren): 139 behind

The title is not mathematically settled, but a solid weekend in Austin would leave Antonelli needing only steady results from there.

Russell’s season deserves a fair reading. Three wins is a respectable return, and in most years it would mark a driver as a front-runner. The difficulty is purely relative, and it is sharpened by the race for second. Russell is just nine points clear of Hamilton and 17 clear of Verstappen. Losing a Mercedes one-two in the drivers’ standings, in a season this dominant, would sting.

There is a lighter footnote this weekend. As RacingNews365 points out, Antonelli is under the American legal drinking age of 21, so if he reaches the podium at the Circuit of the Americas, he cannot legally drink the champagne. F1 has arrangements for exactly this situation. It is a quirk that underlines how young the likely champion is.

Wolff starts planning for life after Wolff

PlanetF1 reports that Wolff is assessing Mercedes personnel as potential successors. He has run the team since 2013, presided over eight consecutive constructors’ titles from 2014 to 2021, and is also a significant shareholder. That combination of owner, chief executive and team principal is what makes the succession hard. No single candidate is likely to inherit all three roles, and splitting them changes how the team works.

The timing is sensible. Mercedes leads the constructors’ championship on 578 points, 134 clear of Ferrari, and has won 11 of the 17 races. Handovers are best planned from strength, when the next person inherits a working structure rather than a crisis. The contrast with Red Bull is instructive: Horner’s two decades in charge ended abruptly, and the team had to restructure mid-season. Wolff appears determined to avoid that.

The open question is how far he steps back. If he remains as shareholder and overseer, any new team principal will work in his shadow, at least at first. That can be a strength, offering continuity and experience, or a constraint, if the successor cannot make decisions independently. The Horner revelation shows how personal the role has become in the modern era: these jobs involve rivalries, alliances and driver relationships built over years. Whoever follows Wolff will need to build their own.

Full race distance returns in the 2028 draft

PlanetF1 reports that an early draft of the 2028 sporting regulations restores full-length races after a single season of reduced distances. A draft is not a final rulebook, and it must still pass through the usual consultation and World Motor Sport Council approval. Even so, the direction is clear.

Distance shapes almost everything about a Grand Prix. Since the late 1980s, the standard minimum has been roughly 305 kilometres, with Monaco the long-standing exception. That length determines how many pit stops make sense, how much tyre degradation matters and how much energy management the drivers must carry. With this generation of power units, energy deployment has been a running debate all season. Shorter races compress strategy windows, reduce the chance of a car failing late on and remove some of the endurance element that sets Formula 1 apart from shorter-format series.

There are fair arguments for shorter races: tighter broadcast slots, less time spent nursing tyres and equipment, perhaps more flat-out driving. But a sport that compares eras and records gains from consistency. Reversing the change after one season suggests the case for it was never strong enough to outweigh what was lost. A rule that lasts only a year also creates an awkward anomaly in the record books. On balance, the reversal is the right call, and the FIA deserves some credit for being willing to change course rather than defending a decision for the sake of it.

Austin: McLaren’s gamble and the ghosts of 2017

McLaren has confirmed upgrades to the MCL40 for the United States Grand Prix aimed at the car’s main weaknesses, and the team openly admits the package could go either way. That honesty reflects the stakes. McLaren sits third in the constructors’ championship on 339 points, just seven ahead of Red Bull. Singapore narrowed that gap from 11 points: Norris and Oscar Piastri finished fourth and fifth for 22 points, while Verstappen’s win and Isack Hadjar’s recovery from 22nd to 10th earned Red Bull 26.

Bringing new parts this late is a calculated risk. If they correlate with the wind tunnel and simulation, they could decide the fight for third. If they do not, McLaren could spend valuable track time working out whether to revert. The Circuit of the Americas is a demanding test, with a bumpy surface and a fast sequence of esses in the first sector that quickly exposes an unstable platform.

Red Bull arrives with momentum. Verstappen converted pole into victory in Singapore, and the second car is now scoring more consistently. Hadjar sits eighth in the drivers’ standings on 97 points.

Austin also brings an anniversary. RacingNews365 recalls the 2017 race, when Verstappen passed Kimi Räikkönen on the final lap for third, only for the stewards to rule that he had left the track to complete the move. A five-second penalty dropped him to fourth, and he was ushered out of the cooldown room before the podium ceremony. That episode still frames track-limits enforcement at COTA, where the wide run-off has repeatedly tempted drivers.

The judgement for this weekend is simple. If McLaren’s upgrade works, third place in the constructors’ championship becomes McLaren’s to lose. If it does not, Red Bull’s improving second car could carry the team into third before the season ends.

Bottas, Carey and Interlagos 2006

• Pressure on Bottas at Cadillac. Ralf Schumacher has said Valtteri Bottas’s Formula 1 story is “simply finished” and has suggested a replacement at Cadillac, according to PlanetF1. The newcomer has yet to score, and Bottas finished 19th in Singapore, two places behind team-mate Sergio Pérez.
• Chase Carey on MotoGP. The Liberty Media director has told Autosport and Motorsport.com that MotoGP “can’t just copy” the Drive to Survive formula. That is a sensible warning: Netflix’s series worked for F1 because it found an audience that had never been courted, and that opportunity rarely repeats in the same form.
• Twenty years since Interlagos 2006. On 22 October 2006, Fernando Alonso clinched his second world title in Brazil as Michael Schumacher drove what was then his final Grand Prix. Two decades later, Alonso is still racing at 45, although Aston Martin’s seven points this season make for a quieter campaign.
• The scramble for second. Only 23 points separate Russell, Hamilton, Verstappen and Leclerc. Ferrari’s pair finished second and sixth in Singapore, and that four-way fight may now be more open than the title itself.
• RB’s rookie lesson. Arvid Lindblad started ninth in Singapore but finished 15th and a lap down, while Liam Lawson took seventh. RB’s 32-point cushion over Alpine for fifth looks secure, but Lindblad’s ability to convert grid positions into points will shape how his first season is judged.