It was an anonymous email sent and designed for maximum impact.
It landed in my inbox almost 24 hours to the minute since Christian Horner was cleared of any wrongdoing following an internal investigation by Red Bull.
Other names included Liberty Media boss Greg Maffei, which owns the rights to F1. FIA President Mohammed Ben Sulayem and F1 CEO Stefano Dominacali.
F1 team bosses were also included for good measure. Like Max Verstappen’s father, Jos.
It was from an anonymous sender, the title was just the date – ‘February twenty-ninth’.
In it was a link to a Google Drive with 79 files that claimed to be evidence from an independent investigation.
There’s no way of knowing whether they were real or fake, but regardless, it sent another shockwave through the F1 paddock before this season had even started.
Horner was sitting on the team during the second practice session in Bahrain when the email went down.
After the session, he walked out of the team garage and into the hospitality unit where he stayed as the nuclear fallout began.
He survived the outcome of an internal investigation into misconduct following a complaint from a female colleague.
He wonders if he will survive this public humiliation again – again, regardless of whether they were real or fake.
Just hours earlier, McLaren CEO Zak Brown and Mercedes boss Toto Wolff called the sport’s governing body, the FIA, demanding transparency.
“I just read the statement, which was pretty basic,” Wolff said. “My personal opinion is that we can’t really look behind the curtain.
“There is a lady in the organization who talked to HR and said that there is a problem and that it was investigated and yesterday the sport received a message that everything is fine, we have looked into it.
“I believe that with the aspiration to be a global sport, for such critical topics, it needs more transparency and I wonder what is the position of the sport?
“We are competitors, we are a team and we can have our personal opinion or not. But it is more like a general reaction or action that we as a sport need to evaluate, what is right in that situation and what is not.
“Are we talking with the right moral approach, with the values based on the speculation that exists? As a sport, we can’t afford to leave things vague and opaque on critical topics like this, because this will catch us back.”
Brown added: “Ultimately it is the responsibility of the organizers of Formula 1, the owners of Formula 1, to make sure that all the racing teams and the staff and the drivers and everyone else involved in the sport work in a way that we all live by.
“I don’t think it’s about the roles and responsibilities of the teams. It’s up to the FIA and Formula 1 to finally decide and ask what they think gives them the level of transparency they need to ultimately come to a conclusion, and we just have to count on that fulfill that obligation to all of us.”
The emailed dossier will only add to that pressure in the form of scrutinizing Horner – who has always denied the allegations.
It also puts Red Bull in an awkward position.
If the emailed file is legitimate and contains elements from the initial report, which have been thoroughly examined and presented by an independent CC, then this is certainly nothing new to them and their decision to stay with their team leader stands.
The twist that simply now that they went public would likely see criticism that they intended to keep their report private to save face.
Regardless of the outcome, it’s a mess for the world champions. Reports of a conflict between Horner and Verstappen’s father have grown in recent weeks.
So it was interesting that Jos Verstappen was in the paddock wearing a team jacket and seemed indifferent to the chaos going on around him
Categories: Optical Illusion
Source: HIS Education